Kenneth Carpenter, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medical Psychology (in Psychiatry) at CUMC

Dr. Carpenter is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 10 years experience in screening, diagnosing, and treating substance abusing and dependent individuals.

His major research interests include the role of environmental context on drug treatment outcome and the use of behavioral analytic accounts of human language and cognition for understanding the mechanisms of change in drug treatment programs.

Dr. Carpenter received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Hofstra University in 1995 and he completed a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Research Training Program at The Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in 1998.

Dr. Carpenter oversees the clinical training of doctoral and master level therapists in our division and supervises psychiatry residents in substance abuse counseling. He has been a Principal Investigator on a grant testing the utility of alcohol subtype models for predicting the onset of alcohol dependence in non-treatment seeking problem drinkers and Co-Principal investigator on a NIDA funded behavioral therapy development grant for treating comorbid depressive and drug use disorders.

He is now developing experimental models of human language and cognition in order to investigate the role of these factors in drug use and treatment facilitated behavioral change. He is also interested in acceptance based therapy strategies for treating substance abuse.

Research Interests

Publications

• KM Carpenter H Jiang MA Sullivan A Bisaga SD Comer WN Raby AC Brooks EV Nunes: Betting on change Modeling transitional probabilities to guide therapy development for opioid dependence.  Psychology of Addictive Behaviors  2009;23: 47-55
• KM Carpenter JL Smith E Aharonovich EV Nunes: Developing therapies for treating depression in drug dependence: Results of a Stage 1 therapy development study.  American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence  2008 ;34: 642-652
• KM Carpenter AC Brooks: Psychosocial treatments for substance use disorders Guiding principles for promoting behavioral change.  Primary Psychiatry  2006;13(2)
• KM Carpenter AC Brooks SK Vosburg EV Nunes: The effect of sertraline and environmental context on treating depression and illicit substance use among methadone maintained opiate dependent patients a controlled clinical trial.  Drug and Alcohol Dependence  2004;74: 123-134
• KM Carpenter E Schreiber S Church D McDowell: Drug Stroop performance Relationships with primary substance of use and treatment outcome in a drug-dependent outpatient sample.  Addictive Behaviors  2006;31: 174-181