Nathan Sackett, MD, MS is trained as an addiction psychiatrist, focusing on the intersection between substance use and psychiatric disorders. He attended medical school and nursing school at UCSF, graduate school at UC Berkeley and completed his adult psychiatry residency and addiction psychiatry fellowship at the University of Washington. He is now a junior faculty at the University of Washington in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences where he splits his time between seeing patients and research. Clinically, he works primarily outpatient seeing a range of patients with primary psychiatric issues and substance use disorders. His research focuses on the use of psychedelics to treat substance use disorders with a particular interest in how psychedelics can augment the psychotherapeutic process and facilitate behavioral change. When he is not working, he is spending time with his family and playing in the ocean.
In two decades at UW, Dr. Hartzler’s principal focus has been on the dissemination and implementation of empirically-supported health services for persons with substance use disorders. To date, this includes local, regional, national, and international collaborations, encompassing federally-funded work with diverse community-based settings (i.e., addiction care, mental health, primary and specialty medical care, criminal justice, HIV care, schools, faith-based organizations), including those affiliated with the NIDA Clinical Trials Network. As director of the UW Center for Advancing Addiction Health Services (CAAHS), he oversees a broad portfolio, including: 1) the SAMHSA-funded Northwest Addiction Technology Transfer Center (Northwest ATTC), which provides universal, targeted, and intensive technical assistance to the addiction workforce in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington 2) regional contribution to SAMHSA’s national Opioid Response Network (ORN), 3) a host of externally-sponsored implementation projects with single-state authorities as well as other organizations, and 4) contribution to NIH-funded and intramural health services research. In professional endeavors that span a science-to-service continuum, Dr. Hartzler seeks to promote adoption and implementation of useful treatment and recovery practices in community settings where they may benefit persons with substance use disorders.
