Tessa Matson, 2022 Graduation Speech

GILBERT S. OMENN AWARDEE (DOCTORAL)
Tessa Matson, Health Systems and Population Health
When people think of addiction, they may think in binaries: Someone is addicted to a substance or they are not. Someone is in rehabilitation or they’re not receiving any treatment. These binaries around addiction are inaccurate, stigmatizing and they don’t leave room for understanding the broad spectrum of substance use disorders and the wide array of treatment options for people with these health challenges.
Tessa Matson has spent the past four years studying and researching screening and assessment tools for substance use disorders that are patient-centric, equitable, and recognize the complexity that comes with motivating people to change their behaviors.
Tessa earned her undergraduate degree in psychology from Whitman College, and participated in AmeriCorps upon graduation where she coordinated free medical and mental health care at a trauma-informed school-based health center that sought to meet the needs of at-risk students who were disconnected from more traditional health services. Later, she volunteered at a psychiatric hospital in Morocco, coordinating programs and activities for patients. It was there Tessa realized the important role health systems and structures (or the lack thereof) had on population health. That realization inspired her to get her MPH degree at the UW, and she continued her studies to earn her Ph.D. in Health Services, which she is receiving today.
During her time at SPH, she has widely published and secured funding for her research. She currently has 26 publications, six of which she is the first author on. Tessa also received four years of funding to work as a predoctoral fellow at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and has been a research interventionist at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute.
As Emily Williams, professor and doctoral program director in Health Systems and Population Health would say of Tessa: “Her studies are certain to be high profile and to change the way cannabis use disorder is identified and treated in primary care for ages to come. Few doctoral students will have such clinical impact resulting from their dissertation work.”