Meet the team disrupting addiction treatment

Marc Chiodo, CVA, serves as Vice President of Finance at NorthStar, where he leads the financial strategy and operations that keep a growing telehealth company sustainable and built to last. He brings more than a decade of finance and accounting expertise to the role, with particular depth in business valuation, the discipline of understanding what an organization is truly worth and the mechanics that drive it.

Before NorthStar, Marc spent years in valuation and litigation support, most of it at Doeren Mayhew in the Detroit area, where he rose from consultant to manager and led teams producing expert valuations for complex matters. A Certified Valuation Analyst and a finance graduate of Michigan State University, he brought his expertise in-house at NorthStar in 2021. For Marc, the numbers were never the point, the people behind them were. He sees financial stewardship as a form of care in its own right, because every sound decision means the company can reach and treat more patients.

Evelyn DeJesus is Vice President of Clinical Care at NorthStar, where she leads the clinical teams and care delivery behind the company's mission to change how the country treats alcohol and substance use disorder. She came to that work after more than two decades on the front lines of critical care, carrying a single conviction: that even the most advanced medicine falls short without compassion, dignity, and a team that feels truly valued.

Across fifteen years leading critical care, including roles as Director of Nursing at Massachusetts General Hospital and Nurse Manager of the Medical-Surgical ICU at Trinity Health of New England, she united rigorous, evidence-based practice with a people-first culture. Her teams achieved a full fiscal year with zero hospital-acquired infections, earned a national Beacon Award for nursing excellence, and meaningfully reduced the use of patient restraints. She earned a master's in Nursing Leadership while mentoring new nurse managers and teaching as a clinical instructor. She is a board-certified Nurse Executive (NE-BC) and holds CCRN board certification in Critical Care Medicine.

Nicole Kent leads clinical operations at NorthStar, bringing nearly two decades of frontline nursing and a doctorate in nursing science to the company's mission. A board-certified obstetric nurse who spent most of her career in labor and delivery, she has guided families through some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, and that bedside experience is the foundation of everything she does today.

Her research began with a question she couldn't shake: why families affected by substance use are so often met with judgment instead of support. She earned a PhD at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, collaborating since 2015 with Dr. Lisa Chiodo, now NorthStar's co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. Her dissertation analyzed health records for more than 23,000 adults in opioid use disorder treatment and found that patients who stay on medication are retained longer, evidence that continued treatment, not abstinence, should be the goal.

Before NorthStar, she was Assistant Nurse Manager of a large maternity and infant unit at Hartford Hospital and has taught nursing students at UMass Amherst and the University of Connecticut. She is also a world-champion martial artist, with gold from the 2017 International Tae Kwon-Do World Championships.

Richard Sparkman leads brand strategy, communications, and engagement for a company working to change how the country treats alcohol and substance use disorder. Partnering with NorthStar's physicians, researchers, and technologists, he shapes how the organization shows up in the world, trading the shame-based frameworks that have long defined the recovery industry for a model built on science, personalization, and real compassion.

He joined NorthStar as Director of Digital Marketing in 2022 and stepped into his current role in 2025, bringing more than fifteen years of experience across digital marketing, e-commerce, and the arts. Earlier he led e-commerce for a portfolio of 200-plus entertainment and nonprofit clients and became one of Shopify's earliest Partners and certified Experts.

Brittany Walser is a healthcare operations leader with more than fifteen years of experience driving organizational growth, operational excellence, and strategic transformation across healthcare, technology, and customer-experience organizations. As Director of Operations at NorthStar, she leads enterprise-wide operational strategy and the cross-functional work behind the company's mission of delivering high-quality, patient-centered care, applying Six Sigma principles to sharpen efficiency, strengthen performance, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Before NorthStar, she held multiple leadership roles with HIMSS and HIMSS Analytics, managing global partnerships, professional services, and client success teams across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. She is passionate about building sustainable systems and empowering teams, convinced that strong systems and strong people are inseparable.

Kaila M. Brooks leads NorthStar's enterprise-wide compliance program with a commitment to integrity, accountability, and excellence. With more than 15 years of experience in healthcare compliance, regulatory affairs, quality improvement, and accreditation, she brings depth that spans clinical operations, risk management, and organizational governance.

When Kaila joined NorthStar, the organization was in its startup phase. She built the compliance infrastructure from the ground up, creating and maintaining all organizational policies and procedures to establish a fully operational program. Today she oversees its continued advancement, leads all phases of CARF accreditation and re-accreditation, and manages provider licensing and payor credentialing.

Before NorthStar, she served as Director of Compliance and Quality at Groups Recover Together and as Quality Improvement and Risk Management Coordinator at Purdue University's North Central Nursing Clinics. She holds a B.S. in Public Health Promotions from Purdue and is pursuing a Master of Public Health from Purdue Global.