KaeLee Newton is a Quality Assurance Specialist for the state of Missouri working at Saint Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center (SLPRC) in St. Louis, MO. She has worked at the facility for nearly 15 years (A fact she can hardly believe when she thinks about it!) starting as a Psychiatric Technician during graduate school. In her role as Quality Assurance Specialist, Ms. Newton enjoys playing with data and making pretty charts and graphs to help translate sometimes overwhelming information into more easily understandable representations. When not at work, she continues creating pretty things by making jewelry or crocheting. She is also trying to see just how many books her bookshelves can hold before collapsing under their own weight as well as working on filling her digital bookshelves with an equal number of undiscovered favorites. She is equally happy talking about research design and data collection as she is about the last great book she read so feel free to start a conversation if you see her wandering between presentations!

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Christopher La Tourette La Riche is double board-certified (by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology) in Adult Psychiatry and Addiction Psychiatry. He is an expert psycho-pharmacologist, an award-winning psychotherapist and an international keynote speaker and educator on addiction and the neuroscience of trauma and mood disorders. He was the founding medical director at Elements Behavioral Health’s first start-up facility, Lucida Treatment Center, which prioritizes evidence-based treatment of addiction and mental health disorders. Dr. La Riche has an extensive background in the humanities and entered medicine after a career in education and the arts. He received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in Comparative Literature, a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s department of Applied Linguistics and is a fluent speaker of six languages (English, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, German and French). He lectures and sees patients in all of these languages.

He has an unusually broad vision of addiction and mental health treatment including involvement in the public sector (medicaid/medicare models), County Hospitals (public psychiatry), insurance-based and out-of-network models, community mental health, the “Medical Home” model, Academic medicine and medical education, Concierge private practice, and international models of addiction and mental health care (Paraguay, Brazil, Italy). He has contributed to creating public policy on addiction treatment on a variety of levels, both local (the Palm Beach County opiate epidemic) and international (Paraguay’s first-ever addiction treatment conference, Brazil’s national Neuropsychology annual meeting). He is an impassioned educator involved in outreach, marketing and increasing public awareness for the humane and neuroscience-based treatment of people with addictions and mental health disorders. He is voluntary assistant professor of psychiatry at Florida International University and has received the highest honor awarded to any educator from the University of Miami: The George Paff Award for Excellence in Medical Education.

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Mark Felchlia, PhD, is a licensed Psychologist who works with Deaf Services and the Cognitive-Behavioral Program, and is the site Internship Training Coordinator for St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center. He completed his PhD in clinical psychology from St. Louis University in 1992. Clinical interests include individual therapy in long-term treatment settings, the impact of involuntary treatment on the change process, and the psychologist’s role while working with a multidisciplinary team.

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