Primary Investigator
Kurt D Lebeck
Kurt D. Lebeck, MSW, is a substance use and co-occurring disorders (SUCOD) recovery science and behavioral health services researcher specializing in program development and implementation. He is committed to increasing equitable access to recovery and recovery-oriented systems of care (ROSC). Kurt has worked with inpatient and outpatient behavioral health treatment programs, helping people with SUCOD mobilize recovery capital and improve their quality of life. He has helped organizations integrate medications for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD) into recovery-oriented programs, developed a recovery-oriented cognitive behavioral therapy intensive outpatient program (IOP), evaluated the implementation of a program designed by a person with lived experience, and is implementing a peer-led recovery-oriented support program in New Mexico.
Kurt is the President of the New Mexico Society for Addiction Medicine, a chapter of ASAM. He also teaches master’s level Social Policy at the Smith College School for Social Work in Massachusetts. In addition, he is a second-year Ph.D. Student and National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Training Fellow at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management in Massachusetts, where he is learning to incorporate quantitative methods in his work.
Kurt draws on his own and others' lived experiences of resilience, recovery, survival, and flourishing, including managing chronic pain, to improve behavioral health programs and policies. He incorporates critical, organizational, social, and individual change theories to enhance the responsiveness of behavioral health systems to the needs of those in their care. He is interested in collaborative research and program design approaches where lived experience and mixed methods combine to improve recovery science, recovery-oriented programs, behavioral health services research, and addiction medicine.
Currently, Kurt is leading the implementation of a program that targets recovery capital in screening, assessment, planning, and support of clients in SUCOD treatment. The implementation team comprises certified peer support workers, case managers, and clinicians and is sponsored by a grant from the N.M. State Opioid Response. By centering these professionals’ voices in the project's development, he hopes to refine and develop an interventional set of tools that accelerates SUCOD recovery while reducing program dropout and, for staff, reducing churn, burnout, and role drift.
Kurt holds an MSW from Smith. He completed clinical social work training at a Veterans Administration hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, where he provided veterans with CBT, especially Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. In addition, he worked with a team of psychologists to bring a Motivational Interviewing practice community to the hospital. Before his time at the VA, he completed a counseling internship with young adults and adolescents at a performing arts organization in Richmond, California. Before entering the behavioral health field, he founded and managed a design and build business in 1999 in Brooklyn, NY.
