Barre Center for Buddhist Studies
Barre Center for Buddhist Studies
Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD is the medical director at WestBridge Community Services and conducts clinical research through affiliations with Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. WestBridge is a national non-profit community treatment program, which uses an assertive community treatment approach and provides family-centered treatment for people with co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorders. In his role at WestBridge, he directs the ONCOURSE college student support program. In 2004, he helped coordinate the first NIH-funded, randomized controlled trial of a mindfulness-oriented treatment for substance dependence, called Spiritual Self Schema therapy. He completed adult psychiatry residency at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance, and he was awarded the Young Investigator Award at the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry for his ongoing research on buprenorphine for opioid dependence. He completed the Harvard Medical School addiction psychiatry fellowship and was a winner of the Dupont-Warren psychiatry research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He has long had a special interest in research integrating mindfulness into addiction treatment and recently completed a trial of mindfulness training for smoking cessation funded by the National Institute for Drug Abuse and the Mind & Life Institute. He also conducts research among people with co-occurring mental illness and substance dependence as well as emerging adults with substance misuse. He serves as a faculty member on the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy.