Leadership Team

Ron Lott majored in economics at the University of Houston after serving as a medic in the US Army. He spent the next 40 years as CEO of Lott Marketing, a sales and marketing agency in the foodservice industry. Ron has served on numerous boards of Fortune 500 food manufacturers, industry organizations, and private companies. After retiring in 2015, he began volunteering in the prison system for Bridges To Life. A year later, Ron found SMART Recovery and introduced our InsideOut® program to the Texas prison system, which has authorized this program’s use at all of its correction facilities. He co-authored, along with Charles True, Successful Life Skills, and has generously donated all proceeds from the book’s sales to SMART Recovery.

Tom Horvath is a founding board member of SMART Recovery. A graduate of St. Johns College, he went on to earn a PhD from the California School of Professional Psychology at San Diego. After serving as an active duty Navy psychologist for three years, he established a practice as a clinical psychologist. In 1985 he founded Practical Recovery, which offers a self-empowering alternative to 12-step and disease-oriented addiction treatment. Dr. Horvath is past president and fellow of the San Diego Psychological Association. In 2015 he received their Distinguished Contribution to Psychology award. He was appointed by Speaker Willie Brown in 1992 to the California Controlled Substances Prescription Advisory Council, which produced recommendations regarding California’s triplicate prescription program for controlled substances. Dr. Horvath was elected in 2016 as a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA). He is a past president of the APA Society of Addiction Psychology (Division 50), the world’s largest organization of addictive behavior psychologists. He has taught graduate school substance misuse courses since 2010 and is the author of Sex, Drugs, Gambling & Chocolate: A Workbook for Overcoming Addictions.

Rob McDonough is the Director of ESG and Regulatory Initiatives at Angel Oak Capital and leads the ESG integration process across the firm’s investment strategies and corporate sustainability initiatives. He also coordinates a variety of research and publication activities with a focus on developments in the regulatory environment for financial institutions of all types.

He previously led Angel Oak’s financial institution advisory practice, managing client engagements which included risk model validations, strategic and regulatory stress testing implementations, and investment portfolio risk and performance assessments. Rob was Angel Oak’s Chief Risk Officer from 2012-2014 and initiated the organization’s enterprise-wide risk management framework and SEC compliance program. He also served in the Federal Reserve System for 12 years, first as an Economic Analyst in the Research Division and later as a Capital Markets Examiner in Supervision and Regulation.

Rob earned an M.B.A. in Finance and Economics from Georgia State University and a B.B.A. from Emory University.

Randy Lindel, Assistant Treasurer, holds a BA from Harvard College and an MBA from the University of Washington. In his twenty-five year advertising agency career, Mr. Lindel worked with the J. Walter Thompson and McCann-Erickson agencies, was a founding member and director of account services for the Backer & Spielvogel agency, and was COO of Bates Worldwide before becoming a marketing consultant. His specialties include competitive positioning, communications strategy, agency selection, and planning facilitation. His association with SMART Recovery began in 2009 as a program participant. Mr. Lindel then became a meeting facilitator at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2010, a member of the SMART Board of Directors in 2015, and treasurer in 2017. He has participated in drafting the current editions of the SMART Handbook and SMART Facilitators Training Manual. He regularly contributes to the marketing, communications, and website needs of the organization.

Roxanne Allen graduated from University of West Florida summa cum laude with a degree in accounting, and became a licensed CPA. She worked for many years as an auditor, accountant, and a treasurer with firms in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina. While raising her family in Virginia, Ms. Allen became an active volunteer in numerous education-related projects, facilitating and enhancing communication between faculty/staff and parents, serving as supervising volunteer for scholastic chess, and earning numerous recognition awards in the process. In 2010, she became involved with SMART Recovery as a meeting facilitator and continues in that role today. She developed the training course for the Family & Friends program, served as Family & Friends coordinator from 2013 to the present, meeting facilitator, and also editor of SMART Recovery’s Family & Friends Facilitator’s Manual and Handbook. A member of the SMART Recovery Board of Directors since 2014, Ms. Allen now chairs the SMART Recovery’s Fundraising Committee and Strategic Planning Committee, and devotes some 20-30 hours each week to the organization, including its social media outreach efforts.

Bobbe Baggio, PhD, has been involved with SMART Recovery since 2011 and has worked with SMART to develop training solutions globally. She has been the Chairperson of the General Training Committee for SMART Recovery International since 2017.

Since 2002, Bobbe has been CEO of Advantage Learning Technologies, Inc. She has held academic positions as the Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Online Learning, Adjunct Faculty, Associate Provost and Graduate Program Director of the MS program in Instructional Technology Management.

Bobbe is an author, public speaker, strategic advisor, educator in instructional technologies and learning, and a learning and talent development consultant for a global and virtually connected workforce. Her expertise draws upon her experience as a Fortune 100 IT manager, 20 years of consulting experience, and her doctoral studies in instructional design for online learning. She believes in designing training based on research in instructional principles and that technologies are here to help everyone and enhance human performance. Her most recent article is AI and the Agile Workforce, published in Workplace Solutions Magazine, 2nd Quarter Ed., 2019.

Joseph Gerstein, MD, FACP, a retired Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School, introduced Rational Recovery into the greater Boston area before becoming the founding president of the new nonprofit entity, the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Self-Help Network, Inc., d.b.a. SMART Recovery, in 1994. He reprised his role as president for the 2017-2018 term. Dr. Gerstein is responsible for the widespread penetration of the Massachusetts medical environment by the SMART Recovery program. He has personally facilitated over 3,000 SMART Recovery meetings, almost 800 of which were held in prisons, and he has invented tools currently used in the program. Dr. Gerstein has delivered approximately 100 lectures and workshops on SMART Recovery, including those at Harvard Addiction Symposiums, the International Association of Addiction Medicine meeting in Helsinki, and other national and international venues. Dr. and Mrs. Gerstein introduced SMART Recovery into Great Britain (UK) and Australia (AU). The former professor served on the Board of SMART Recovery UK and AU, and helped grow the former to its present sponsorship of almost 500 weekly meetings, over 80 of which take place in prisons. He is also responsible for the introduction of the SMART program into Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and South Africa.

Daniel Hostetler comes to us from the West Side of Chicago, where he directs Above and Beyond Family Recovery Center. This free outpatient behavioral harm-reduction addiction treatment center features SMART Recovery and SMART Family and Friends alongside six other self-help process groups.

Before this chapter in his life, Dan served as president of an international change management consulting firm and has resolved thousands of business dilemmas during his 24-year consulting career. With a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management, a Diplomate in Logotherapy (Viktor Frankl), a CADC, and a CODP I, Dan’s passion for lessening the impact of, up to and including the eradication of, harmful and unwanted addictions is unbounded.

David Koss earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and his law degree from Georgetown University. He began his career as Legislative Director to a Michigan Congressman who served on the House Banking and Science & Technology Committees. In 1983-1984, he served on the staff of the Governor of Michigan in Lansing and Washington.

An attorney in private practice (and a member of the District of Columbia Bar), David has represented banks, investment companies, builders of affordable housing, and tenant advocates. His work has included securities filings, corporate mergers and acquisitions, and government affairs. More recently, serving as the SMART Recovery Director of Government Relations, he has educated numerous Congress members and their staff about SMART Recovery and our need to launch more meetings to help end the opioid and broader addiction epidemic.

David’s association with SMART Recovery began in 2015 when he became a meeting facilitator. He has served as Regional Coordinator for our Delaware-District of Columbia-Maryland region since 2017. David has led the growth of the SMART Recovery East Coast into a premier annual event bringing together participants, volunteers, professionals, addiction scientists, and public health officials.

David received the Joe Gerstein Award in 2019, recognizing his extensive volunteer work benefiting the SMART Recover community.

Bill Stearns, is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and holds an MS in corrections from Xavier University in Cincinnati. He has a JD from Salomon P. Chase School of Law at Northern Kentucky University. Mr. Stearns has been an attorney in his own general practice law firm in the greater Cincinnati area for 44 years. For some 30 years, he served as a part-time magistrate in a local juvenile court that he helped establish and over which he presided. He became actively involved in SMART Recovery in January 2011, beginning as a participant then moving on to become a meeting facilitator. He has facilitated at least two meetings per week for the last four years, including the first in-jail meeting in the State of Ohio. In January 2015, Bill was elected to the Board of Directors of SMART Recovery.