Leadership
Stephanie Hutter-Thomas, PhD, CPH, RPS
Founder & CEO
Biography
Stephanie Hutter-Thomas, PhD, CPH, RPS is the Director of Peer & Organizational Development for Maryland Coalition of Families (MCF); Founder & CEO of Appalachian Recovery Concepts, LLC; Co-Investigator for the recovery workforce initiative Mountain Maryland Forward, in partnership with University of Maryland Center for Substance Use, Addiction and Health Research (UMD CESAR); and a 2023-2024 ARC Appalachian Leadership Institute Fellow. She is a member of the UMD IRIS Leadership Committee, the Opioid Research Consortium of Central Appalachia (ORCCA), the Studies To Advance Recovery Support (STARS) network; and serving her second commissioner-appointed term with the Allegany County (MD) Mental Health Advisory Council.
Prior to her current roles, Stephanie served as Research Program Director for the Buprenorphine Implementation Research & Community Health (BIRCH) project through West Virginia University School of Medicine, Department of Behavioral Medicine & Psychiatry. The BIRCH project aimed to integrate and scale-up treatment services in primary care settings for people with OUD, HIV, and HCV in West Virginia.
From 2017-2020, Stephanie led the AmeriCorps Program, Conquering Opioid Abuse Together (COAT), as a program manager for the Office of Civic Engagement, Frostburg State University. In that role, she worked alongside a team of peer support specialists, providing trainings to Western Maryland communities impacted by the opioid crisis.
In 2018, Stephanie also took on the role of Research Program Coordinator for the BeSuRe West Pilot Project by Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, organizing data collection efforts to examine socio-behavioral determinants of HIV, HCV, and overdose risk among people who inject drugs in Western Maryland. She went on to serve as a project researcher in Western Maryland for the Statewide Ethnographic Assessment of Drug Use and Services study (SEADS), characterizing the lived experience of people who use drugs in Maryland.
As a seasoned Mental Health First Aid instructor, Stephanie has provided over 75 workshops since becoming an instructor in December of 2018, certifying more than 600 Mental Health First Aiders. Stephanie is a Master Trainer for the Maryland Department of Health’s Regrounding Our Response initiative and the new West Virginia adaptation of the same curricula. Stephanie is known as strong advocate for peer support services and remains an active contributor to community efforts throughout the state of Maryland and the greater Appalachian region.
