Rikki Patton, PhD, is the program director for the PhD in couples and family therapy (CFT) program and research professor within the Counseling and Family Therapy department. Prior to joining Drexel, she served as core faculty at another institution for nearly 10 years, where she established her line of research and gained extensive experience with program coordination and grant writing. Patton is a licensed marriage and family therapist (OH) and an AAMFT-approved supervisor.

Patton has a scholarly passion for substance use. It has been well established that addiction is a ‘family disease’, impacting multiple domains of life for those struggling with substance use disorder (SUD) and for their important others. While the literature base examining SUD and recovery processes consistently grows, the explicit application of relational-systemic frameworks for understanding patterns and dynamics related to substance use and recovery is lacking. There also continues to be a dearth of knowledge about how to best prepare our behavioral health workforce to manage the complexities of SUD and family dynamics concurrently, especially within the context of interprofessional collaboration and education. Her research plan is driven by these issues, with a focus on 1) systematically examining substance use prevention, treatment, and recovery using relational-systemic theoretical frameworks and 2) focusing research on interprofessional workforce development related to the intersection of substance use and relational systems.