Our Consultant Experts
THE EXPERTISE YOU DESERVE
SAE’s diverse consultants have impressive educational credentials, extensive practical experience in key specialty areas, and time-tested expertise.
The SAE Team efficiently analyzes your needs and tailors a configuration of consulting experts to empower you to succeed with the next steps of your unique organizational journey.
The following are a select list of key consultants and content experts.
Brian M. Baldwin, LCSW, has extensive experience in Program Evaluation and Compliance. He has previously worked in the NYS OMH Division of Quality Management and Bureau of Inspection and Certification, and currently heads Baldwin Consultants. During his years at OMH, Mr. Baldwin conducted on site evaluations of most of the inpatient, outpatient and residential mental health programs in the metropolitan area. Baldwin Consultants has provided Comprehensive Program evaluations for inpatient psychiatric hospitals, outpatient mental health and substance abuse programs as well as consultation on medical record documentation and Assessment and Treatment Planning instruments design. Mr. Baldwin also has extensive experience in the substance abuse treatment field as a Program Director with the New York State Drug Abuse Control Commission and as a Consultant developing inpatient and outpatient substance abuse programs, as well as providing Program Evaluation services for Substance Abuse Treatment Programs.
Rhonda Bohs, Ph.D., has over 25 years of experience in conducting research and program evaluation including serving as the lead evaluator for multiple SAMHSA-funded initiatives. Additionally, Dr. Bohs has served as Site Investigator for activities in the NIDA Clinical Trials Network and as Co-Principal Investigator on a P20 Research Center grant in collaboration with Florida International University and funded through the National Center on Minority Health Disparities.
Dr. Bohs received her M.S. degree in Research and Ph.D. in Applied Experimental Psychology with an emphasis in Social Psychology from Saint Louis University. She has conducted research and program evaluation in health disparities, as well as program evaluation in hospital, community mental health centers, health departments, community based organizations and business settings. Throughout her career, Dr. Bohs has developed an expertise in implementing and evaluating programs targeting special populations, hard‑to‑reach populations, and in developing and implementing systems of care strategies within community based organizations and integrating behavioral and primary health service delivery systems.
Dr. Bohs is also SAE’s Director of Operations.
Susan M. Bowler, Ph.D., has extensive experience in policy/program development and implementation in state child welfare, juvenile justice and children’s mental health agencies. She was the Project Director and Principal Investigator on three Children’s Mental Health (System of Care) Initiatives targeting children under 21 with serious emotional disturbances. Dr Bowler has led strategic processes that integrated services across child welfare, children’s behavioral health, and juvenile justice for the highest risk children and adolescents and their families. Most recently, Dr. Bowler has been a leader in system wide reform in the state of Rhode Island as they seek to fully integrate economic development, employment support, and clinical/social services in a single plan to assist the highest risk youth to succeed in the market economy.
Frank Guida, PhD, is a psychologist, trained at the University of Chicago. As SAE’s lead evaluation director for many years, he has overseen several Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)-funded grants and mentored the team through excellent growth. Prior to that, he was a psychologist at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey-Community Mental Health Center, where in addition to practicing psychotherapy, he conducted epidemiological studies of pathological gambling and was on the staff of the Research Diagnostic Project funded by NIDA and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
Alex Hutchinson, MBA has more than 25 years of healthcare experience in performance measurement and management, healthcare program assessment and implementation, provider contracting and negotiation, financial analysis and risk assessment, analysis and interpretation, and the application of business practices to care management processes.
He is founder and managing partner of RPM Health, which provides payer, purchaser and provider clients with business-based solutions to managing the cost and risk of purchasing provider or consumer healthcare services, working directly with health plans, Fortune 500 corporations, public sector agencies and systems, hospitals and physician organizations.
HEALTH CARE, MANAGED CARE, AND ORGANIZATIONAL CEO
Dynamic, outcome-focused executive successfully leading rehabilitation, medical, behavioral and service related organizations. Exceptional financial and operations acumen, deploying strategies to grow organizational presence and success, build trust among staff, identify and implement opportunities for improvement, and create a constancy of purpose to help achieve and advance organizational goals while adhering to the organization’s vision and mission.
Accomplished in compliance and regulatory affairs with extensive knowledge of national and state-wide trends, Medicaid redesign, healthcare provider systems, care management, and regulatory requirements.
Big picture thinker combined with a strong leadership personality and a commitment to serve and advocate for medically and developmentally fragile individuals. Academic credentials include a Ph.D. in Psychology. Former Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at NY Presbyterian Hospital.
Sam Josepher is a grant-writing and organizational development professional with over twenty years of senior executive experience in the nonprofit sector. For seven years, Ms. Josepher has worked to develop communications/ marketing plans, enhance foundation and government funding, and increase donor bases for social services agencies focusing on HIV/AIDS, chronic diseases, reentry services, workforce development and life skills, and youth services.
Sam is the Co-Founder and former Deputy Executive Director of Exponents, NYC and curriculum developer of the highly recognized ARRIVE Training, a health literacy program with measurable medications adherence outcomes. In her tenure as the Deputy Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer of Exponents, Sam successfully managed an annual budget in excess of $ 3.8 million and was responsible for generating over $ 35 million in government and foundation funding.
She has served as an adjunct lecturer of New You University School of Philanthropy and Fundraising, Long Island University, and has been invited to present to NYC Planning Groups, a White House Commission, and technical assistance conferences. She has held offices on numerous nonprofit boards of directors. Ms. Josepher received her Bachelor of Science from St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn and a Master of Public Administration from the Executive Program at CUNY Bernard Baruch School of Public Affairs.
Tara Kunkel, MSW, is an award-winning, nationally known expert in the fields of criminal justice, substance use disorders, law enforcement, and public health and the way they intersect at both the national and community levels.
Currently, Tara is working on three wide-ranging national initiatives. The Rural Justice Collaborative centers on improving justice inequalities in rural communities, by creating a new model centered on rural leaders developing solutions to rural problems, which can be replicated. A second project, funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections, deals with the effects of extreme stress and “vicarious trauma” and how it directly impacts parole and probation officers. And a third project, the Adoption of Virtual Services in Judicially Led Diversion Programs Initiative, is examining how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the court system and their justice and treatment partners, as they were forced to operate online.
She has also served as a Senior Drug Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance and led the implementation of the Comprehensive Opioid Abuse Program and grew it from a $27 million grant program in 2017 to $187 million in 2019.
As an independent consultant, Kunkel has directed over 25 projects within the criminal justice system for various cities, counties and states, as well as overseas.
Harriet Lessel, LCSW, has a track record of securing government grants for a complex organization serving over 17,000 children and families annually with family support, mental health, education and youth development services. As the Director of Government Contracts and Advocacy at JCCA, she managed a team that oversaw government contracts and identified funding sources for new programs consistent with the agency’s mission, convening senior staff to evaluate grants and develop an effective response as well as writing and submitting proposals. She has successfully raised millions of dollars for new programs, enhancements and infrastructure.
Ms. Lessel also facilitated the application to New York State for JCCA to be designated as a provider of children’s behavioral health services and to obtain the Article 29 license related to the transition of children in foster care to Medicaid managed care. Additionally, she specialized in program development and consulting with rape crisis programs as part of the first Department of Health-funded Center of Excellence on primary prevention of sexual violence, and brings significant clinical expertise in providing trauma-informed care to every team.
Frank McCorry, Ph.D., is the CEO and President of FAM Consulting, Inc., a consulting practice dedicated to integrated behavioral health services within health care reform. Dr. McCorry previously served as the Director of New York City Operations for the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services.
His long career in the addictions field has focused on system transformation and integration efforts, most notably in the areas of public health, HIV/AIDS, co-occurring mental health and addictive disorders, quality and performance measurement, health care reform and parity compliance. Dr. McCorry has been the Principal Investigator on SAMHSA, NIH and foundation grants focused on the integration of services for persons with co-occurring mental health and addictive disorders, on HIV/AIDS services and on performance improvement.
Dr. McCorry is a founding member and former Chairperson of the Washington Circle, an initiative to develop substance abuse performance measures for use in managed care and public sector settings. He served as co-Chair of the Steering Committee for the National Quality Forum’s National Voluntary Consensus Standards for the Treatment of Substance Use Conditions: Evidence-based Treatment Practices. Dr. McCorry is a former member of the United States Center for Substance Abuse Treatment’s National Advisory Council and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment. Dr. McCorry received his doctorate in Counseling and Human Services from St. John’s University in 1982.
Eugene Anthony Meyer, Psy.D., is a clinical psychologist with expertise in health psychology. His 20 years of leadership experience in healthcare span clinical service delivery, research, operations, management consultation, and program development.
In addition to his graduate education in psychology, he has a master’s degree in healthcare policy and management from SUNY Stony Brook University, and a master’s level certificate in public health and outcomes measurement from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Meyer has held management and academic faculty positions in several large healthcare organizations including Partners Healthcare, Northwell Health, and the New York City Health + Hospitals system. As a healthcare consultant, his project management and coaching experience includes service line redesign in preparation for managed Medicaid, healthcare transformation (change management, improving outcomes, value-based care), and quality/performance improvement.
Dr. Manchester is a professionally trained evaluator and process improvement expert with a PhD from the Ohio State University in Quantitative Research, Evaluation and Measurement in Education (earned 2007). Her master’s degrees are in Industrial/ Organizational Psychology and Educational Policy and Leadership. She is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. She is the lead author of peer-reviewed publications in Military Medicine, Evaluation and Program Planning, and Performance Improvement. She has trained educators, health professionals, medical faculty, and the prevention workforce on building their processes and capacity to improve effectiveness demonstrations in health and behavioral health settings. She has held leadership roles as a Principal Investigator, Program Manager, and Evaluation Scientist on federal (DHHS-HRSA; DoD-DHA; OMH) and state (Ohio) agreements (ODH; ODE; OMHAS; OCMH).
As a facilitator of evaluation knowledge for clients, colleagues, and stakeholders, she strengthens prevention policy, provides capacity support to workforce development programs (e.g., employee assistance, substance abuse, risk reduction, suicide prevention, retail food protection) through logic modeling and strategy development, creates needs assessments and analyzes gaps and redundancies in support of the prevention workforce, and facilitates discussions on suicide prevention planning resources with stakeholders.
She has real world, applied experience spanning over 21 years in program management, evaluation, and research in public health (environmental health, retail food protection, health disparities, suicide prevention, alcohol and drug prevention, coalition building), health (traumatic brain injury, psychological health, delirium, dementia, diabetes, depression, palliative care), K-12 (school safety), and criminal justice sectors. She is an active member of the American Evaluation Association (AEA) (2006 to present), the Maryland Writers’ Association, and The Virginia Writers Club.
Maria Messina, Ph.D., is a medical anthropologist with nearly 30 years of experience conducting both long- and short-term ethnographic fieldwork, nationally and internationally, with funding from Fulbright, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA), the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ).
Maria’s areas of expertise range from indigenous healing practices and popular culture in North Africa to public health and ethno-epidemiological fieldwork among a variety of vulnerable populations at high risk for multiple morbidities, i.e., the reception or transmission of HIV/AIDS, other STI’s, and behavioral health disorders.
The populations of focus include, e.g., ethnic minority and gender variant young and adult men who have sex with men (Y/MSM); youth at risk for drug use and forensic involvement in a Venezuelan favela, homeless youth in NYC who injected crack; long-term outcomes of adjudicated youth in residential drug treatment in the U.S. and Canada; and homeless, severely mentally ill adults with alcohol, drug dependencies, and/or other co-morbidities.
Maria also has extensive experience as a program evaluator of projects funded by The Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Gilead Science, The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), and The AIDS Institute.
Carrie Muchow, Ph.D., has successfully completed her doctoral dissertation at the Counseling Psychology program, Teachers College, Columbia University. She completed her M.A. and an Ed.M. in Psychological Counseling at Columbia University and has trained in inpatient, outpatient, and forensic-based treatment settings.
She has cultivated clinical experience in the areas of mental health, trauma, and addiction, having served as the Program Manager at the Columbia University Buprenorphine Program and clinical extern at Rikers Island Correctional Facility. Ms. Muchow has clinical experience in the psychosocial treatment of substance use disorders, and her current clinical work consists of neuropsychological assessment and the provision of individual psychotherapy utilizing a range of treatment approaches including CBT, DBT, trauma-focused, interpersonal, and cultural-relational.
She currently serves on several research evaluation projects at SAE and specializes in trauma-informed care.
Teo Norman is a performance-driven healthcare professional with over 15 years of executive leadership experience managing large cap healthcare service delivery portfolios supported by government sponsored programming.
Mr. Norman is currently the Associate Vice President of Medicaid Clinical Operations at the UPMC Health Plan, responsible for designing and implementing innovative, person-centered care management models aligned with value-based payment arrangements for over 400,000 members across a continuum of care.
Mr. Norman graduated from New York University, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service with a Master of Public Administration in Health Finance and Management, subsequently amassing experience in a variety of health care environments including global academic medical centers, managed care organizations, public benefit corporations, health & human service agencies, and city department of health units. Though the organization has varied, his experience has centered on aligning strategic priorities to metrics-based management operations – leveraging analytics to optimize clinical operations and sustain profitability.
Mr. Norman successfully accelerated operating margin performance of portfolios in excess of $60M per annum primarily by actively managing associated cost of care structures and market risks forecasted to materially impact operating margin performance.
Bill Panepinto, LMSW, has worked in the addictions field since 1967, including positions at Kings County Hospital and several other hospitals in New York prior to his twenty-year tenure with the NYS Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS).
He primarily held Program Development responsibility for a wide range of treatment services, including the addition of addiction treatment to the service package for community health centers in the 1980s, and the co-location of outpatient services in Homeless Shelters for Single Adults and Families in the 1990s. Retired in 2000, Mr. Panepinto began to focus on supportive housing grant writing and program development for individuals and families with addiction issues.
In a return to state government in 2007, Mr. Panepinto become the first OASAS Director of Housing Services and was its lead representative in the development of New York/New York III programs for Single Adults and Families, Upstate PSH programs, and the Permanent Supportive Housing component of NYS Medicaid Re-design.
Known for developing innovative collaborations among local government, providers, and advocates, Mr. Panepinto’s efforts include the active involvement of individuals in recovery, an emphasis on rural communities of New York, and the development of multi-county service networks, especially in the context of residential treatment facilities and permanent supportive housing projects.
Gideon Rabino led a multi-disciplinary team of medical and social work professionals in an all-out effort addressing the heroin epidemic followed by the onset of the HIV epidemic plaguing over 400 patients in the South Bronx, for which he and his team were awarded Best Clinic. He then received an offer from NYS OASAS to join their Regional Office team.
For 21 of his 32 years with OASAS, Gideon served as Regional Coordinator for NYC and adjacent communities, overseeing small to very large and complex entities, and providing treatment prevention and recovery services in settings ranging from hospitals to residential and outpatient programs to schools and community centers. In that capacity Gideon, under the leadership of OASAS’ Chief Counsel, assisted in the implementation of Parity for NY’s addicted population by ensuring access to behavioral health and referring complaints to counsel’s office and OASAS/ OMH Ombudswoman.
He then took an active role in establishing managed-care contracts between substance use providers and managed-care organizations (MCOs), and worked directly with providers on all aspects of their operations ranging from governance, leadership, fiscal management, capital development, compliance and certification, personnel and legal issues, patients’ rights, emergency preparedness and crisis management which entailed responses to hurricanes, 9-11 and, more recently, the COVID – 19 pandemic.
An extremely important aspect of his role at OASAS entailed helping providers identify and adapt best practices to address the emerging opioid addiction epidemic within NYS.
Kristin Woodlock RN, MPA, has over 30 years of experience in State and County government and nonprofits.
She has extensive experience in Commissioner positions in New York, including the lead in Children’s Behavioral Healthcare. She has operated inpatient, outpatient and community services for children and co-authored The Children’s Plan.
Are You Interested in Consulting Opportunities at SAE?
SAE’s team of prestigious experts is one of the most diverse in the field of mental health consulting. Not only is each person a standalone reservoir of knowledge and vetted experience, our teams are also uniquely selected to support and complement the needs of the applicant or entity.
