Dr. Amanda Latimore is the Director of the Center for Addiction Research and Effective Solutions (CARES) at the American Institutes for Research. She previously served as the Public Sector Initiatives Lead for the Bloomberg American Health Initiative where she worked directly with public officials to support evidence-based practice, policy and programs. Dr. Latimore also previously served in roles at the Baltimore City Health Department and Behavioral Health System Baltimore where she spearheaded projects such as using Medicaid claims data to identify gaps and efficiencies in the City’s behavioral health service system and conducting daily overdose hot-spotting for the City’s rapid response teams. Recent research includes the identification of barriers to service utilization among overdose survivors and examining experiences of overdose bystanders in the context of the Good Samaritan Law, both of which informed local policy and practice changes. In partnership with the Baltimore City Health Department, Dr. Latimore mentored a Baltimore-based technology team, Code in the Schools, to develop a text-based service called Bad Batch (badbatchalert.com), a harm reduction tool which has received national recognition. Home-grown from the department of Epidemiology as one of the inaugural Brown Health Community Scholars, Dr. Latimore continues to focus on the community-informed applications of social epidemiology in and out of the classroom. Her role as the Bloomberg American Health Initiative Public Sector Initiatives Lead is to support and facilitate the bridge between academia and public service agencies and provide technical assistance for local and state agency-led health initiatives.