Our scientific staff routinely publish in peer reviewed, scientific journals and have extensive National Institutes of Health grant experience (see www.chestnut.org/li). This breadth provides an expansive repertoire of scientific methodologies to empirically address your important commercial questions.
David A Sharar, Ph.D, Managing Director
Dr. Sharar (Dave) is the Managing Director for CGP and a Research Scientist with Chestnut's Division of Commercial Science. Dr. Sharar has published over 70 articles in peer reviewed journals and trade magazines on topics related to EAP effectiveness, outcomes, pricing, ethics, quality, purchaser education, delivery models, and reform in the field. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with an emphasis in Occupational Social Work and a Masters in Public/Community Health. Dr. Sharar is on the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, and the Board of Directors of the Employee Assistance Research Foundation. He also co-chairs the "EAP Group" for the National Behavioral Consortium, serves on the Review Committee for EAPA's Journal of Employee Assistance, and is a long-standing member of EASNA's Knowledge-Research-Transfer Committee. His current research focus is on measuring the effectiveness of EAP interventions.
Dr. Lennox (Rik) is the Vice President and Chief Scientist of Commercial Science for Chestnut Global Partners. Dr. Lennox has over 25 years of experience in measurement and program evaluation, with over 50 articles in peer reviewed journals in the area of applied social measurement and research methodology. Dr. Lennox’s research interest include application of structural equation Modeling to the advancement of applied measurement, the use of routine outcome monitoring for evaluation and quality assurance, the improvement of EAP evaluation methods. Dr. Lennox is the developer of CGP’s Workplace Outcome Suite, which is designed to provide a set of five-item, psychometric constructed and validated, that can be used to evaluate employee assistance program and services. Dr. Lennox serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Behavioral Health Services and Research. He holds a Ph.D. in Personality and Social Psychology from Texas Tech University and a Master’s in General Experimental Psychology from the State University of New York at Geneseo.
Dr. Dennis (Mike) is a Senior Research Psychologist and Director of the Global Appraisal of Individual Needs (GAIN) Coordinating Center at Chestnut Health Systems in Normal, Illinois. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Northwestern University with a focus in Methodology and Evaluation Research. He holds a MERIT award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for his research on managing addiction as a chronic condition and has led over a dozen experiments including the Recovery Management Checkup (RMC) experiments and the Cannabis Youth Treatment (CYT) Experiments. The RMC experiments with adults were among the first studies to show that we can change the long term course of addiction over four years. The CYT experiments remain the largest experiment with adolescent ever done and have been one of the most successful to date in terms of being successfully replicated in over five dozen community based treatment programs in less than five years.
Dr. Dennis has over 300 publications, is on the editorial board of several journals, is the chair of the Data Safety Monitoring Boards monitoring Board for NIDA’s Division of Epidemiology Services and Prevention Research. He has also been recognized by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and Joint Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness (JMATE) as one of the countries leading researchers working bridge the gap between research, evidenced based practices, and practice based evidence.