Board Member

Dr. Albanese is the Chief of Hepatology, and Associate Chief of Staff for Education at the VA Northern California Healthcare System. He is also a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at the UC Davis School of Medicine. He attended college and medical school at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa Oklahoma, graduating in 1986. He did his residency in internal medicine and fellowship in gastroenterology at The St. Luke’s- Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York. During those years, he became interested in addiction medicine, working in the hospital’s methadone clinic and detoxification programs. Under the mentorship of physicians supervising these programs, he became a member of ASAM while still in training at in 1990, and became a certified addictionist in 1991. He completed his hepatology fellowship at the University of Miami in 1992, and after 3 years of private practice, became the co-director of the addiction treatment program at Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach, FL. As an Associate Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Miami, he worked with the GI/Liver transplant programs, and taught in the Addiction Psychiatry fellowship program.   In 2001, he moved to Sacramento California and continued his work at the VA in gastroenterology, hepatology, and addiction medicine.   His clinical research interests have been in the medical aspects of opioid and alcohol abuse, and intestinal changes associated with HIV infection.