Biography

Leah Hamilton, PhD, MPhil, is an addiction health researcher focused on improving screening, assessment, and linkage to appropriate treatment and harm-reduction services for substance use disorders and associated behavioral health issues. She is particularly interested in improving access to these services among people involved in the criminal justice system through interventions rooted in implementation science.  

At KPWHRI, Dr. Hamilton is a senior collaborative scientist currently serves as MPI for a formative evaluation of OUD and HIV risk identification and assessment in Washington (WA) State Prisons (The HOAP study). Dr. Hamilton co-leads the design, implementation and analysis of qualitative data collected from interviews with Washington state prisons staff, incarcerated people, and formerly incarcerated people. She also co-leads the design and analysis of observational field data of assessment processes and focus group strategy sessions, and the dissemination of study efforts. She is also a co-investigator on the Kaiser Permanente Social Needs Network for Evaluation and Translation (SONNET) center, where she is leading a study of Kaiser Permanente member experiences of the community support hub, and a co-investigator on a new PCORI supported study Addressing Social Needs to Improve Health in Adults with Multiple Chronic Conditions: ​A Comparative Effectiveness RCT​, where she will lead qualitative interviews and analysis. Previously she has served as a co-investigator on implementation clinical trials (including the Primary Care Opioid Use Disorder Treatment (PROUD) trial and the Michigan Sustained Patient-centered Alcohol-Related Care (MI-SPARC) trial).

Prior to joining KPWHRI, Dr. Hamilton completed her postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Population Health at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, where she contributed to a Clinical Trial Network study of screening and assessment for substance use in primary care settings (CTN-0062Ot), and a National Institutes on Drug Abuse-funded R01 study (R01DA045872) examining the impact on overdose mortality of public health policies that aim either to restrict the supply of opioids or to reduce opioid-related harms. She completed her PhD in Criminal Justice at Temple University in Philadelphia in 2019, and MPhil at Cambridge University, Institute of Criminology, in the UK in 2010, during which she worked on multiple studies of substance use and behavioral health among justice-involved populations.