Howard Shaffer is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Division on Addictions. He has written extensively about the treatment of addictive behaviors and the nature of addictions.

Dr. Richard Saitz is a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Boston University’s School of Medicine, associate director of the Youth Alcohol Prevention Center and director of the Clinical Addiction Research and Education program. He studies the effectiveness of a brief, hospital-based tailored intervention for patients with alcohol problems.

Dr. Marc Galanter is director of the division of alcoholism and drug abuse in the department of psychiatry and a professor at the New York University School of Medicine. His books, Spirituality and the Healthy Mind: Science, Therapy and the Need for Personal Meaning (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Cults: Faith, Healing and Coercion (Oxford University Press, 1999), deal […]

Alexandre Laudet is a social psychologist and the director of the Center for the Study of Addictions and Recovery at the New York City-based National Development and Research Institutes. NDRI, a nongovernmental research agency, works to advance scientific knowledge of substance abuse, mental health, HIV/AIDS and related social and health concerns in order to contribute […]

Christopher D. Ringwald was a journalist in Albany, N.Y., and the author of The Soul of Recovery: Uncovering the Spiritual Dimension in the Treatment of Addictions (Oxford University Press, 2002). Ringwald studied and wrote about how the use of spirituality within a wide range of treatment options works. He also examined the controversies surrounding the faith-based treatment […]

Kevin Chen is a professor of addiction psychiatry at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Piscataway, N.J. Dr. Chen additionally studies adolescent substance abuse and conducts studies investigating the feasibility and efficacy of Chinese energy therapy and meditation as a treatment.

Gerard Connors is director of the Research Institute on Addictions at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has studied Alcoholics Anonymous participation, spirituality and alcohol outcomes.

Margaret Ensminger is a professor and associate chairwoman of the department of health, behavior and society at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. She has studied inner-city youths and families and has done research on the effect of family religiosity on young adults’ alcohol use.

Save Our Selves, or Secular Organizations for Sobriety, was founded in North Hollywood, Calif., in 1985 as an alternative to AA. The largest secular sobriety group in the world, it has 100,000 members, including believers who want to keep religion separate from recovery as well as atheists, secular humanists and non-Christians. It respects diversity, welcomes skepticism […]