John W. Newcomer, Thriving Mind President and CEO, gave the Plenary Talk at the University of Central Florida’s College of Medicine’s Focused Inquiry & Research Experience (FIRE) 14th Annual Conference on Feb. 17.
His talk was titled: “Improving Access to Mental Health and Substance Use Treatment Services.”
Newcomer is President and CEO of Thriving Mind South Florida, the non-profit organization that oversees safety net mental health and substance use treatment services for Miami-Dade and Monroe counties, with funding of over $135 million per year from Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF), as well as other federal, state, local and private sources. Dr. Newcomer is a board-certified psychiatrist with over 30 years of inpatient and outpatient experience delivering evidence-based and measurement-based practices. During two decades at Washington University in St. Louis, he became the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Medicine and served in leadership roles for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded General Clinical Research Center, the Clinical Translational Science Award, and the Center for Clinical Studies; he remains Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University. He served as Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research at the University of Miami School of Medicine and as Executive Vice Dean for the College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University.
Dr. Newcomer is Principal Investigator on grants funded through the National Institute of Health (NIH) and/or the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for 30 years. From 2007-2019 he was a member of the Metabolic Disorders Steering Committee of the Biomarkers Consortium of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, targeting reductions in cardiometabolic morbidity and mortality. In 2014 he was named to the Thomson Reuters List of Highly Cited Researchers. In the public sector, he was consecutively appointed by Governors from both parties to serve as Chair for the Medicaid Drug Utilization Review Board for the State of Missouri for 13 years, providing oversight for $1.2 billion in drug expenditures.
