Speakers

As a junior at Grosse Pointe North High School, Daniel excelled in academics and athletics. Daniel's ultimate goal was to attend the U.S. Naval Academy located in Annapolis, Maryland, and then pursue a career in the military as a Navy Seal.

All that changed on September 5, 2019, when Daniel became very ill as a result of a severe illness due to vaping. He was 16 years old. After spending 29 days on life support, Daniel faced imminent death prior to receiving the first double lung transplant in the world from a vaping related illness on October 15, 2019. While Daniel is doing well, full recovery from a lung transplant can take months.

Today, Daniel is committed to sharing his story publicly through his non-profit organization, Fight4Wellness. The mission is to encourage young people to live a healthier and happier lifestyle and improve overall mental wellness by providing alternatives for coping with the pressures of being a teenager void of substances.

Daniel plans to graduate high school in the spring of 2021 and attend college.

On September 6, 1997, Ken Daniels achieved his lifetime goal of becoming the TV Play-by-Play voice of a National Hockey League team, hired by the Detroit Red Wings to be their lead hockey announcer on Fox Sports Detroit.

In 2002, he was named by readers of the Detroit Free Press as best Play-by-Play announcer. In 2006, he won his first Michigan Emmy award for excellence in television play-by-play. In 2003 and 2010, Ken was named Michigan Sportscaster of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. Also in 2010, Ken received the Detroit Sports Media’s ‘Ty Tyson Award’ for excellence in Sports Broadcasting. In the spring of 2013 Ken was named “Top Sportscaster in Michigan” in a Detroit Free Press poll.

In 2017 Ken Daniels became an author. He is now working on a second book focusing on the Opioid Epidemic in America. Ken is co-founder of the Jamie Daniels Foundation, (jamiedanielsfoundation.org) dedicated to ending the shame and stigma that surrounds drug addiction. Ken has partnered his opioid awareness efforts with the Children’s Hospital of Michigan Foundation. The long-term goal of the foundation is to build a long-term recovery home, “The Jamie Daniels Recovery Center.” Jamie died in his sleep in Florida at the age of 23, on December 7, 2016. The family contends, “It’s not the years in the life, but the life in the years.”

My goal is to Master the art of helping others. My focus is to help those persons that find themselves disenfranchised due to various disorders. I seek to assist a person with creating pathways to navigate themselves toward a desired quality of life accompanied by overall wellness.

I delight in timely innovations that provide consistent intervention and support for those in need. At Abundant Community Recovery Services, we are among the industry leaders as it pertains to Recovery Housing, Recovery Supports and Mobile SUD Services.

Educated in Detroit Public Schools, California State University Fresno (undergrad) and Liberty University I shall continue to strive for excellence and quality of life for our community.

Lori Mello is currently the Program Manager of HMSA’s Gambling Treatment Program. She was formerly the Manager of Clinical Best Practice at Training & Treatment Innovations, Inc. for 4 ½ years. Prior to TTI, Lori worked as the Community Education Coordinator at HAVEN, an agency that deals with domestic violence and sexual assault. She has also worked in fundraising and campaign at United Way, served as Associate Director of Women’s Survival Center in Pontiac, and did extensive case management in Detroit and in Oakland County at CareGivers. There she worked with and supervised teams that worked with at-risk families and youth providing in-home counseling and support services. She also worked to find permanent housing for families in Detroit shelters as well as with persons diagnosed as HIV positive or with AIDS. In addition to her full-time employment, Lori enjoys teaching human services, psychology and sociology courses at Baker College. Lori holds an undergraduate degree in Social Work from San Diego State University, a graduate degree in Counseling from Oakland University, and a graduate degree in Public Administration, also from Oakland University.

Dr. Ondersma is a Professor in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and the Division of Public Health at Michigan State University. His primary interest is in population-level interventions promoting maternal and child health in underserved communities, particularly via technology-based brief interventions for substance use in the perinatal period. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 37), former Editor of the journal Child Maltreatment, and a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers. He currently co-chairs the Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome subgroup of the NIH’s Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) initiative. He has led multiple NIH and CDC studies focusing on the development, validation, and implementation of novel screening techniques and electronic/mobile (mHealth) interventions in healthcare settings. He is also the developer of the Computerized Intervention Authoring System (CIAS 3.0), an NIH-funded, free research resource facilitating development of interactive and sophisticated digital interventions for any platform.

Cara Poland, MD, M.Ed, FACP, DFASAM was trained in internal medicine at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan and in addiction medicine at Boston Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. She has an interest in educating healthcare providers and providers-in-training to improve care for patients with substance use disorders and alcohol use disorders. She is an assistant professor at Michigan State University. She is the Past President of the Michigan Society of Addiction Medicine. She is the medical director of addiction medicine at Spectrum Health and collaborates with other providers in Spectrum Health’s GREAT MOMs program to treat pregnant women with substance use disorders.