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Keith N. Humphreys, PhD, MA – Career Development Awardee

Keith N. Humphreys, PhD, MA Keith N. Humphreys, PhD, MA
VA Palo Alto Health Care System
Menlo Park, CA 


Keith Humphreys, PhD, is a Senior Research Career Scientist at the VA Palo Alto HSR&D Center for Innovation to Implementation and the Esther Ting Memorial Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. He received his doctorate in clinical/community psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and his practice license from the State of California Board of Psychology. He is currently the Principal Investigator of two VA HSR&D grants, one focused on interventions to help Veterans dependent on long-term benzodiazepines to self-taper and the other focused on the costs and consequences of opioid overdoses. He also heads the Stanford/VA Palo Alto component of the NIDA Clinical Trials Network's Western States Node, a partnership with NIDA and the Oregon Health Sciences University. In addition to his scientific projects, he is actively involved in teaching addiction treatment methods to medical students, psychiatric residents, and clinical psychology interns. Professor Humphreys has published more than four hundred scientific papers, has received national and international awards for his work, and has been a consultant to The White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, The Centers for Disease Control, The Center for Mental Health Services, The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, The Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, and The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He has testified to the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate as well as to the U.K. Parliament. He has also served as a consultant on mental health-related issues to agencies in other nations, including Spain, Bulgaria, Iraq, Ireland, Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Africa.

Dr. Humphreys has been extensively involved in supporting VA operations throughout his career. This includes a decade overseeing the monitoring and evaluation of VA's national system of substance use disorder treatment programs as Director of the Program Evaluation and Resource Center. He was also appointed to multiple high-level VA task forces by Secretaries and Under Secretaries of Health, which led him to have a major role in the development of VA's National Mental Health Strategic Plan and the reconfiguration of VA services that occurred after the commencement of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For his mental health-related service to Veterans and the people of Iraq, he received the American Psychological Association's 2010 award for Distinguished Contributions to the Public Interest.

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