Professor Robin Room is a sociologist who has directed alcohol and drug research centres in the United States, Canada and Sweden, and now Australia, his native country. He is a Professor at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health of the University of Melbourne and at the Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs at Stockholm University, and the Director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre, in Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia. He has received awards for scientific contributions in the U.S., Sweden and Australia, including the premier international award in alcohol studies, the Jellinek Memorial Award for Alcohol Studies, and the 2012 Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Drug and Alcohol Endeavours. From 2006 to 2012, he was President of the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, the national peak body of non-governmental organisations in the field. He has been an advisor for the World Health Organisation since 1975, has been a president of an international scientific society, the Kettil Brunn Society for Social and Epidemiological Research on alcohol, and is Editor-in Chief of Drug and Alcohol Review. Professor Room’s research is on social, cultural and epidemiological studies of alcohol, drugs and gambling behavior and problems, as well as studies of social responses to alcohol and drug problems and of the effects of policy changes. Recent books on which he is a co-author include Cannabis Policy: Moving beyond Stalemate; Drug Policy and the Public Good, and the 2nd edition of Alcohol-No Ordinary Commodity, all published by Oxford UP.

Dr James Nicholls is Research Manager at Alcohol Research UK and and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Dr Nicholls is author of The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England, and has published widely on the history of drinking and addiction. In 2011-12, he completed a British Academy research fellowship on recent developments in British alcohol policy, and has previously completed a research fellowship investigating historical perspectives on local alcohol interventions for the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Dr Mark McCann is the research Statistician at the Institute of Child Care Research at Queen’s University Belfast. Mark has worked in health and social care services research, public health research using administrative date, and drugs and alcohol research. His current methodological work is looking at using smartphones to study how social networks influence drugs and alcohol use among young people. His primary interest lies in casual inference: uncovering the life events and pathways that can lead to problems such as alcohol use, and finding ways to address them.

Dr Jonathan Ling is a public health researcher, with interests in alcohol and drug use. He is a Reader in Public Health in the Department of Pharmacy, Health and Wellbeing at the University of Sunderland. Jonathan is funded as a staff member of Fuse, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health, a UKCRC Public Health Research Centre of Excellence.

Professor Ray Hodgson was trained at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and continued doing alcohol research there until he left for Cardiff in 1983. He took up a post as head of the Cardiff Clinical Psychology Service until 1995. From then until April 2003 Ray was Director of the Cardiff Alcohol Research Unit within the University of Wales College of Medicine, Division of Public Health. He is now Research Director of the Alcohol Research UK. Ray has been a World Health Organisation advisor on alcohol and drugs, Deputy Editor of addiction, Editor of Behavioural Psychotherapy, Editor of the Journal of Mental Health & the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, Chairman of the Welsh Advisory Committee on Alcohol Misuse and President of the Society for the Study of Addiction. He has published on a wide range of issues in the addiction field including psychological treatments, health promotion, screening and dependence.

Dr Sarah Wadd worked for five years for the NHS in Scotland as an epidemiologist specialising in infections associated with injecting drug use before moving to her current post at the University of Bedfordshire in 2010. Here, she identified substance misuse and ageing as an issue which is significantly under-researched but is likely to become of increasing importance in the future and established the Substance Misuse and Ageing Research Team (SMART), to answer some of the key unanswered questions in this area. In 2011, Alcohol Research UK (ARUK) funded Sarah to carry out a study exploring the experiences of older adults with alcohol problems and investigating what strategies and approaches are likely to be most successful in treating them. The report generated a significant amount of interest which has raised awareness of the issue. Sarah discussed the findings in an interview on the BBC’s Panorama programme and the results were published in the Telegraph newspaper and Better Health magazine. Sarah has also analysed existing data on older adults from nationwide surveys and administrative datasets to give insights into drinking behaviour, treatment prevalence and factors associated with alcohol problems in this population. She has recently completed an ARUK funded study on ways to improve the detection and treatment of alcohol problems in older adults with cognitive impairment. The findings of an analysis of existing data on illicit drug and medication misuse in older adults are due to be published in april 2014.

Professor Tim Stockwell is Director of the Centre for Addictions Research and Professor of the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria, Canada. Tim has published over 300 research papers, book chapters and monographs, plus several books on the prevention and treatment of problems related to substance use. He is a psychologist who worked as both a clinician and researcher in the UK before spending 16 years with Australia’s National Drug Research Institute as Deputy Director and then Director. He studied Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford University and obtained a PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. Tim is committed to the advancement of public policy on substance use issues, with a particular focus on alcohol and public health. Since moving to Canada in 2004; he has established the Centre for Addictions Research of British Columbia. The centre is a multidisciplinary research enterprise that seeks to shed light on the social, cultural and psychological determinants of harmful substance use and advances knowledge of effective policy and practice. Tim was a President of the international Kettil Brunn Society for Social and Epidemiological Research on Alcohol, 2005-7 and was award the Jellinek Award 2013 for outstanding research on the social, policy and cultural aspects of alcohol related problems. His current research interests include the public health impacts of minimum pricing, managed alcohol programs for homeless problem drinkers and the science underlying the hypothesis that moderate alcohol use promotes health.