Secretariat

The Secretariat for the Reference Group is currently based at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), located at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

The Secretariat is led by the Centre’s Director, Professor Richard Mattick and is supported by Professor Louisa Degenhardt, Dr Bradley Mathers, Associate Professor Kate Dolan, Dr John Howard and Dr Alex Wodak in 2009-2010.

Current members of the Secretariat to the Reference Group

Richard P. Mattick is the Professor of Drug and Alcohol Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney within the Faculty of Medicine. He has authored over 100 scientific articles and books on the assessment, nature and treatment of emotional, cognitive and psychological and neuropsychological problems. His major current research interests are in clinical trials for management of opioid dependence, psychostimulant substitution therapy, treatment of young drug dependent people, and the effects on cognitive functioning of exposure to psychostimulants and opioids. He was the coordinator of the federally funded National Evaluation of Pharmacotherapies for Opioid Dependence studying 1500 opioid dependent patients assessing the impact of naltrexone, methadone, buprenorphine, and LAAM. He has conducted the largest randomised clinical trial of buprenorphine versus methadone, and this study is a pivotal study for the US FDA registration of buprenorphine. He is an Editor on the Cochrane Review Group for Drugs and Alcohol, and Assistant Editor and Executive Editor (respectively) on the international journals Addiction and the Drug and Alcohol Review.

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Louisa Degenhardt is a Professor at NDARC and is currently the recipient of an NH&MRC Senior Research Fellowship. She started at NDARC in 1998 as a Research Assistant to the then Executive Director, Professor Wayne Hall. She completed her PhD in 2001 on the comorbidity between drug use and mental health problems in the general population, and her Masters in Clinical Psychology in 2002.

Louisa led a number of national illicit drug surveillance projects from 2001-2008. These included the Illicit Drug Reporting System (IDRS), the Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System (EDRS, formerly the Party Drugs Initiative (PDI)) and the National Illicit Drug Indicators Project (NIDIP). She was the chief investigator on a project examining the Australian “heroin shortage”, which began in 2001.

Louisa is an investigator on a large case control study, funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), examining potential gene-environment interactions between childhood trauma and the later development of heroin dependence. She is currently leading an NH&MRC-funded data linkage project examining mortality among more than 40,000 opioid dependent persons entering opioid replacement therapy across a twenty year period in New South Wales, Australia.

She is currently involved in several international projects examining the epidemiology of drug use and dependence, and related problems, across the globe. These include involvement with the WHO’s World Mental Health Survey Initiative, the Secretariat to the Reference Group advising the United Nations on Injecting Drug use and HIV, and co-chairing the Expert Group on Mental and Illicit Drug Use Disorders for the 2005 Global Burden of Disease project.

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Bradley joined NDARC in 2006 as a Senior Research Officer working on the Program of International Research and Training (PIRT). Bradley has a background in medicine and drug and alcohol work and has an interest in international social development. He is currently coordinating the Secretariat for the Reference Group to the United Nations on HIV and injecting drug use and is also working on a project developing and evaluating specialist services for female drug users in Iran.

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Alex Wodak trained as a physician and, since 1982, has been Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney, Australia. Dr Wodak and his colleagues helped to establish the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, the Australian Society of HIV Medicine, Australia's first (pre-legal) needle exchange programme and Australia’s first (pre-legal) medically supervised injecting centre. Dr. Wodak is currently the President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and is a member of several state and national committees. He often works in developing countries to assist efforts to control HIV infection among injecting drug users.

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Dr John Howard joined NDARC in 2008 as a Senior Lecturer and works with the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre, as well as NDARC's international research activities and those with a focus on young people. Previously, he had been an Honorary Visiting Fellow at NDARC since 1995. From 2001 until the end of 2007 he was Director – Clinical Services, Training and Research, Ted Noffs Foundation. From 1989 to 2001 he was a Senior Lecturer in Psychology and Director, Social Health Programs, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University. He is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in the Department of Adolescent Psychiatry, Prince of Wales Hospital.

He has worked as a high school teacher, school counsellor, deputy superintendent of a residential unit and senior counsellor of a community-located unit for young offenders.

He was a member of the Technical Steering Committee of the WHO’s Department of Child and Adolescent Health and Development (CAH) for 6 years, and from 1992 he consulted to CAH, UNICEF, UNODC and the Arab Council on Childhood and Development, on street youth/children in developing countries and the health of male adolescents, working at WHO/HQ in Geneva and field-work in India, Philippines, South Africa and Egypt. Since 1999 he has consulted to UNESCAP, with field-work in Lao PDR, Viet Nam, China and Thailand on capacity-building for the community treatment of young drug users.

He is a Board Member of NCETA, was a member of the Evaluation Working Group of the National Youth Suicide Prevention Strategy, and is a member of a number of National Illicit Drug Strategy working and reference groups.

His major clinical, teaching and research areas are: adolescent substance use and ‘street youth’ (in both developed and developing countries), comorbidity, depression and suicide in young people, working with marginalised youth, adolescent psychotherapy, same-sex attracted youth, HIV infection in adolescents, resilience, and treatment capacity-building.

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Hammad Ali is a medical doctor and a public health graduate. He has worked in the public health development sector in a developing country before moving to Australia. He has been a trainer for two international medical students’ organizations and has delivered numerous trainings abroad. Currently he is working as part of the secretariat for the Reference Group to the UN on HIV and injecting drug use.