Sara Polley, MD is board certified in child and adolescent psychiatry, adult psychiatry, and addiction medicine. She is currently the Director of Addiction Psychiatry for Ellie Mental Health and a Medical Director for Horowitz Health. She is passionate about advocating for, developing, and providing services within the Level 1 continuum with the goal of creating a model where patients with co-occurring illness have an outpatient medical home. In addition to her clinical work, she enjoys teaching along with professional and community engagement. She is a part of the ASAM adolescent level of care writing committee, serves as an on-call addiction consultant for MN state, consults to insurance companies with the goal of improving parity, teaches medical students at the University of Minnesota, and is an appointed member of the Minnesota Cannabis Advisory Council as an expert in substance use disorder prevention and treatment. She enjoys public speaking and is open about her experience as the child of a parent lost to alcohol use disorder in an effort to normalize this experience for others.

Dr. Polley completed her child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School. She did additional training with Harvard’s pediatric addiction team, a world leader in the field. Dr. Polley completed her adult psychiatry training in a joint program between Sheppard Pratt Hospital and the University of Maryland. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Medical School and earned her bachelors of science degree in child psychology from the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development.