Lisa Marsch, PhD
Principal Investigator of the Northeast Node
Director of the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health
Andrew G. Wallace Professor, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College
Dr. Lisa A. Marsch is the Founding Director of the Dartmouth Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, a designated “Center of Excellence” supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health.
She is also the Director of the Northeast Node and Chair of the national Steering Committee of the National Drug Abuse Treatment Clinical Trials Network. And she is the Andrew G. Wallace Professor within the Departments of Psychiatry and Biomedical Data Science at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. She also directs a NIDA-funded T32 training program for pre- and post-doctoral fellows focused on research in substance use and co-occurring disorders.
The Dartmouth Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) is a national interdisciplinary Center housed at Dartmouth and includes affiliates within the Geisel School of Medicine, the School of Arts and Sciences, The Thayer School of Engineering, and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. CTBH also includes interdisciplinary partners across the U.S. and internationally. CTBH uses science to inform the development, evaluation, and sustainable implementation of digital health tools (that leverage mobile, sensing and data analytics approaches) for health behavior targeting a wide array of populations and health behaviors, with a particular emphasis on substance use and mental health disorders. These digital tools are designed to scale up access to science-based treatment and collectively lead to transformations in the delivery of science-based health care.
Dr. Marsch has been Principal Investigator on 45 grants, largely from the National Institutes of Health. She has led the development, evaluation and implementation of digital therapeutics for substance use prevention and treatment, HIV prevention, mental health, and chronic pain management.
Her work in technology and addiction treatment has been particularly pioneering, as she is widely recognized as having led the development of one of the most widely tested and evidence-based mobile intervention for addiction treatment – which became the first FDA-authorized “prescription digital therapeutic” in the US (prescribable software which provides gold standard behavioral treatment). Prescription digital therapeutics enable scalable access to science-based medical grade therapeutic tools. In a world where the vast majority of people suffering with mental health and/or substance use disorders cannot or will not access traditional models of behavioral health care, these technology tools offer unprecedented access to effective therapeutic support tools.
As Director of the Northeast Node of the NIDA CTN, Dr. Marsch leads a broad partnership of stakeholders focused on research and dissemination activities addressing the most timely and significant issues related to substance use disorder (SUD) care. These studies span topics of: examining pharmacist-integrated models of medication treatment for opioid use disorder (MOUD), evaluating MOUD for adolescents with opioid use disorder (OUD), and harnessing digital health to understand clinical trajectories of individuals with OUD. Among these studies, Dr. Marsch’s group was the first to identify digital biomarkers of relapse to opioid use and MOUD non-adherence among individuals in outpatient MOUD treatment.
She additionally maintains a priority focus on mentoring investigators, including pre-doctoral fellows, post-doctoral fellows, medical students, medical residents, undergraduates, high school students, and junior faculty.
Dr. Marsch publishes extensively and is a regular keynote speaker at national and international scientific meetings (including invited presentations at the White House, U.S. Congress, the World Bank, the United Nations and for the US Surgeon General). Her work has been covered by numerous media outlets across the world, including the New York Times, BBC World News, Wired Magazine, the Associated Press, ABC, NPR, and US News and World Reports. She has served as a consultant to the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at the World Health Organization and on the National Advisory Council to the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) in Singapore.