A. Thomas McLellan, Ph.D. is Deputy Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in the Obama-Biden Administration. Formerly a Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, McLellan co-founded the independent, non-profit Treatment Research Institute (TRI) in 1991, and led it in various capacities until his ONDCP appointment in spring 2009.
McLellan is nationally and internationally recognized for his more than 30 years of addiction research. In 1991, he co-founded TRI as an independent translational center to adapt and engineer promising scientific findings into useful products and services that could be broadly used throughout the field. Through TRI, McLellan’s work promoted better understanding of addiction as a chronic illness that must be continually monitored and managed, much like other chronically relapsing medical conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. He was one of the first in the field to document the problems confronting the “business” of the nation’s substance abuse treatment system and, with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, laid the groundwork for a first-of-its kind partnership between scientists and industry specialists to adapt and apply lessons learned from other industries.
Helping medical doctors recognize and respond to symptoms of alcohol and drug use in patients was another thrust of TRI’s work under McLellan. He worked to help governments promote treatment quality through smart purchasing and other regulatory strategies, and to foster evidence-based practices for such diverse populations as substance abusing offenders and the families and significant others of substance abuse patients. To help keep children safe from drugs and alcohol, McLellan teamed with the Partnership for a Drug Free America to introduce science-based helping tools for parents trying to prevent drinking or drug-taking or intervene when they suspect or know their kids are using. Under McLellan, TRI was one of the first organizations in the nation to document and warn of the availability of drugs over the Internet.
In 2008, McLellan launched a TRI division dedicated to introducing science-based products and services for practitioners and policy makers. The first product, the Risk and Needs Triage, was released early in 2008 and is helping drug court judges and other court officials improve outcomes for drug-involved offenders by matching them to the community placement best suited to their assessed level of criminogenic risk and need for behavioral health services. The Risk and Needs Triage was followed by “TRI-CEP,” another web based tool for judges and treatment providers for substance abusing offenders. TRI-CEP provides the data framework to evaluate drug and other problem solving courts and adaptively manage clients.
McLellan’s emerged as a national leader in the 1980s when he was principal developer of the Addiction Severity Index (ASI) and the Treatment Services Review (TSR), measurement instruments that characterize the multiple dimensions of problems confronting substance abusing patients and the types and duration of treatment services offered in response. These tools have been translated into over 20 languages and are the most widely used instruments of their kind in the world. The ASI and TSR helped revolutionize treatment by giving researchers and clinicians the means to measure and improve upon the efficacy of a variety of addiction interventions.
McLellan has published more than 400 articles and chapters on addiction research. Until his ONDCP appointment, he was Editor in Chief of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment and served on the editorial boards and as a reviewer of numerous medical and scientific journals.
He has served as an advisor to many government and nonprofit scientific organizations, including the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Research and Evaluation; the National Practice Laboratory of the American Psychiatric Association, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the Greek government.
Among McLellan’s many honors and awards are the Life Achievement Award of the American Society of Addiction Medicine in 2003 and the 2002 award for Distinguished Contribution in Addiction Medicine from the Swedish Medical Association. In 2003 he received the prestigious Okey Honorary Lecture Award by the British Medical Society and in 2004 was named Innovator of the Year by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
McLellan was born May 29, 1949 and raised in a small Pennsylvania town near Harrisburg. He received his B.A. from Colgate University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. He received postgraduate training in psychology at Oxford University in England. He is married to Deni Carise, Ph.D. and has one son, Andrew, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Philadelphia.
