Who are we?
Adelina Artenie
Adelina is an epidemiologist with experience in research applicable to the study of drug use and drug-related harms, particularly hepatitis C.
Currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bristol, Adelina pursues infectious disease modelling focusing on hepatitis C and HIV in people who inject drugs, and other vulnerable populations.
Mark Berry
Mark Berry is a lecturer in Criminology at Bournemouth University. His PhD was a semi-covert ethnography of active drug dealers in a city in England. His research aims to investigate the nature of illicit drug markets, the crime risk management practices of drug dealers, and possible reasons for their involvement and patterns of activity.
Mark is an advocate of ethnographic research in ethically challenging settings with hard-to-reach groups. He also has a practical knowledge of the criminal justice system having worked in the Youth Offending Team and has international experience delivering interventions with youth at-risk of serious and organised crime.
Email: mberry@bournemouth.ac.uk
Lindsey Brooke Porter
Lindsey is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in the Centre for Health, Law and Society (CHLS) at the University of Bristol Law School. She explores ethical and conceptual issues that bear on drugs policy and has written on topics such as:
- the moral status of drugtaking
- whether and how drugs pleasure contributes to wellbeing
- why people who use drugs deserve harm reduction measures
Email: l.porter@bristol.ac.uk
Vicky Carlisle
Vicky Carlisle is a Senior Research Associate in Public Health at the University of Bristol. Her PhD was concerned with understanding the concept of recovery within opioid agonist treatment.
Vicky has a background in social care and addiction treatment services and completed her BSc in Psychology, also at Bristol, in 2017. Her research interests include:
- opioids
- stigma
- systematic reviews
- qualitative research methods
- systems-based approaches
- intervention development and evaluation
Email: vicky.carlisle@bristol.ac.uk
Neil Carrier
Neil is Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol. His research career began with a PhD study of the stimulant drug khat and its networks of production, trade and consumption in Kenya and beyond.
Following his PhD, Neil has conducted wider research on drugs trade and policy in Africa, much alongside Gernot Klantschnig, and is currently researching cannabis in East Africa as part of the UKRI funded project Cannabis Africana: Drugs and development in Africa.
Neil’s research has also encompassed a wide variety of other themes in contemporary East Africa, including photography, migration, transnational trade and urban development.
Email: neil.carrier@bristol.ac.uk
Emily Crick
Emily works at PolicyBristol where she supports academics from the Faculties of Arts and Social Science and Law to engage with policymakers to achieve real impact. She completed her PhD in Politics at the University of Bristol in 2018 where she analysed the securitization of drugs by the UN and the US within a broader dispositif of control.
Emily has worked as a researcher on drug policy issues since 2008. She worked as a research associate at Transform Drug Policy Foundation where she contributed to After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation and as a research assistant at the Global Drug Policy Observatory based at Swansea University where she wrote briefings on cannabis policy reform in the US.
Email: emily.crick@bristol.ac.uk
Hannah Fraser
Hannah is a mathematical modeller, primarily working on hepatitis C virus and HIV infectious disease modelling among key populations including people who inject drugs, men who have sex with men and female sex workers.
Specifically, her work focusses on understanding transmission dynamics and modelling the impact and cost-effectiveness of different interventions to reduce prevalence and incidence of disease.
Email: hannah-fraser@bristol.ac.uk
Karina G. García-Reyes
Karina García specialises on the war on drugs and drug trafficking violence in Mexico. She has a PhD in Politics from the University of Bristol, and a background in International Relations.
Karina’s doctoral thesis entitled Poverty, Gender and Violence in the Narratives of former Narcos: accounting for Drug Trafficking Violence in Mexico won the annual prize for best Doctoral Research Thesis in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law 2018/2019.
Currently Associate Lecturer at the University of West England (UWE), her most recent book is: Morir es un Alivio, published by Planeta, July 2021.
Lindsey Hines
Lindsey’s expertise is in the epidemiology of drug use, with a focus on the causes and consequences of use during adolescence. Her current work explores the pathways between adversity, frequent drug use in adolescence, and mental health problems in later life.
By conducting complex causal inference analysis of large, longitudinal cohorts, Lindsey aims to produce work with practical utility for informing mental health intervention.
Email: lindsey.hines@bristol.ac.uk
Adam Holland
Adam is a Public Health Physician with a research interest in the ethical and empirical arguments for:
- different drug policy and harm reduction approaches
- improving healthcare services for underserved populations who use drugs
- the drug policy landscape in Colombia
He conducts research with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Bristol.
Email: adamholland@doctors.org.uk
Lala Ireland
Lala is currently working on an ESRC funded project which examines the impact of opioids’ regulation and policy in West Africa. Her research interests lie broadly in the fields of:
- law
- development
- public health
Lala is interested in research related to the use of opioids for pain management by women experiencing reproductive health conditions. With a background in law, her previous roles include teaching various legal modules including Public international law and international economic law.
Email: lala.ireland@bristol.ac.uk
Jo Kesten
Jo is a Research Fellow in Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School within the National Institute for Health and Care Research funded programme grants ARC West and Health Protection Research Unit in Behavioural Science and Evaluation.
The focus of her research is the development and evaluation of public health and health service interventions using applied social science qualitative research methods. Her research interests include understanding and tackling the challenges experienced by vulnerable individuals experiencing addiction to reduce the harms of using illicit drugs.
Jo has gained experience of addiction science through research projects focused on people who inject drugs, drug dependent female street sex workers and, primary care patients with opioid analgesic dependency.
Email: jo.kesten@bristol.ac.uk
Ester Kincová
Ester Kincová is the Public Affairs and Policy Manager for Transform Drug Policy Foundation, an independent UK-based charity which focuses on educating the public and policymakers on effective drug policy and developing viable alternatives to prohibition.
Ester is an expert on drug policy and the reform agenda, with a specific focus on the UK landscape, working mostly on parliamentary affairs.
Email: ester@transformdrugs.org
Kennedy Kipkoech Mutai
Kennedy is a career Biostatistician and Modeler with 10 years’ experience working in research and policy at health research institutions and government agencies. He has worked with researchers, programme implementers and policy makers in scientific inquiries, generation, and dissemination of new knowledge to inform policy and programming.
Kennedy’s research interest focuses on the use of epidemiological methods, statistical and mathematical modelling approaches to understand transmission dynamics and control of infectious diseases (with a focus on HIV and hepatitis C). Further, he is interested in understanding the trends and predictors of illicit drug use, and programmes and policies for drug use response in sub-Saharan Africa.
Gernot Klantschnig
Gernot Klantschnig is Associate Professor in International Criminology and based in Bristol’s School for Policy Studies, Bristol. His research focuses on:
- the history and politics of drugs and drug policy
- pharmaceutical markets
- policing in West Africa.
He is the author of Crime, Drugs and the State in Africa: The Nigerian Connection (Brill/RoL 2013) and Africa and the War on Drugs (Zed 2012, with Neil Carrier).
Gernot is the principal investigator of two ESRC projects on the Hidden Narratives of Illicit Livelihoods in West Africa and on Cannabis and Development in Africa.
Aaron Lim
Aaron is an infectious disease mathematical modeller with a keen interest in global health. Most of his recent modelling work has involved developing dynamic transmission models to evaluate the impact and cost-effectiveness of interventions for blood-borne virus epidemics (for example, hepatitis C virus and HIV) in the general population and in key risk populations including people who inject drugs.
Aaron’s research projects span various global settings, with a particular focus on low- and middle-income countries. More generally, he is interested in building collaborative projects involving interdisciplinary approaches to the design, evaluation, and implementation of interventions to improve population health in global contexts
Email: aaron.lim@bristol.ac.uk
Olivia Maynard
Olivia is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychological Science and co-director of the School’s Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group.
Olivia is interested in using qualitative and quantitative approaches to:
- understand and counter misinformation about drugs
- develop and evaluate drugs harm reduction education
- increase public and policymaker support for effective harm reduction policies
Email: olivia.maynard@bristol.ac.uk
James Nicholls
James is a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Stirling. He was previously Chief Executive Officer at Transform Drug Policy Foundation, where he led national advocacy campaigns, supported international partnerships and worked with regional stakeholders to promote evidence-based drug policy. Prior to that he was Director of Research and Policy at Alcohol Research UK.
James is author of The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drink Question in England (Manchester University Press) and co-author of Alcohol, Power and Public Health (Routledge) and How to Regulate Stimulants: A Practical Guide (Transform Drug Policy Foundation).
James is a Director at Cranstoun and a trustee of Adfam National.
Email: j.c.nicholls@stir.ac.uk
Catalina Ortúzar-Madrid
Catalina is a Chilean sociologist with experience in mixed methods research on prison population, Chilean drug policy, gender, and poverty. She is also one of the founders of the feminist NGO ‘Observatory of Statistics of Gender and Intersectionality’ (ODEGI) in Chile.
Currently, Catalina is a PhD student at the School of Policy Studies of the University of Bristol. Her research topic is the labour market trajectories of women who have committed drug offences in Chile. Her focus is on understanding women’s involvement in the drug market from a domestic economy perspective, considering the precarity and complexity of labour market conditions for poor women in Chile.
Catalina is also interested in:
- Drugs as part of a domestic economy;
- Positionality of women within the drug market;
- Relationship between the formal, the informal and the illegal market in labour market trajectories of women drug offenders.
Email: bw20509@bristol.ac.uk
Clemence Rusenga
Clemence is a researcher working on the Cannabis Africana: Drugs and Development in Africa project, based at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. His research interests focus on drugs (cannabis) and their socio-economic impact in the African context.
Clemence also researches on land and agrarian issues, and the connections with drug policy reforms.
Sorcha Ryan
Sorcha is the Festival and Nightclub Harm Reduction Lead at Bristol Drugs Project (BDP), the harm reduction provider within Bristol’s drug and alcohol services.
Sorcha runs The Drop, a harm reduction service that specialises in delivering interventions within the Night Time Economy and universities.
Prior to joining BDP, Sorcha interned at Transform Drug Policy Foundation (working mainly on the Anyone’s Child campaign) and completed an MSc in Policy Research at the University of Bristol.
Email: sorcha.ryan@bdp.org.uk
Mary Ryder
Mary Ryder is a PhD student in Security, Conflict and Human Rights at the University of Bristol. Her research explores drugs policy, transitional justice and memory in Colombia through collaborative, creative methods.
Mary works closely with drugs policy advocacy organisations, the Colombian Truth Commission and organisations supporting drug users in Cali, Colombia. She has been working at Transform Drug Policy Foundation since 2016 as the Anyone’s Child: Families for Safer Drug Control coordinator and is interested in the ethics of storytelling with people who produce, use and deal drugs.
Mary is also currently working as a researcher on the project Total Peace: Regulation of Illegal Crops in South West Colombia, at the University del Cauca, Colombia.
Email: mr12859@bristol.ac.uk
Verity Smith
Verity is a Teaching Fellow in Criminology at Bath Spa University. She recently completed her doctoral research which explores the policing of drugs at English music festivals. She is particlarly interested in drug policing, drug markets, intoxication within licensed leisure and ‘party’ contexts, and qualitative ethnographic methods.
Verity volunteers as a social researcher for The Loop.
Email: v.smith2@bathspa.ac.uk
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer is a Lecturer in Criminology at The University of Bath. He has written extensively on the emergence of the ‘County Lines’ drug supply model onto the policy landscape, the practice of ‘cuckooing’ and the associated responses. This reflects his wider research interests into the functioning of illicit drug markets, the enforcement of drug laws and drug policy reform.
Jack has published articles in leading journals and presented papers at a range of international conferences. In 2019 he was awarded ‘Best Early Career Researcher’ by the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy. In 2021 he was the recipient of the prestigious Radzinowicz Prize.
As a member of a number of domestic and international networks, he regularly contributes to practitioner events, public engagement initiatives and media engagements.
He is the co-editor of Routledge’s ‘Drugs, Crime and Society’ book series and sits on the editorial board for The Journal of Qualitative Criminal Justice and Criminology. His first book entitled Policing County Lines was published in 2021.
Email: jhs77@bath.ac.uk
Josh Torrance
Josh is a Criminology teacher and PhD student at Bristol University with a focus on diversion schemes for drug possession.
In addition to academia Josh has experience:
- as a policy advisor in a mayoral office
- working in a needle exchange
- on a methadone team
- managing festival welfare tents
- as a freelance journalist for media outlets
- writing reports for local councils
He has also worked or volunteered for a host of different drug policy charities:
- Transform
- Release
- The Loop
- Volteface
Email: josh.torrance@bristol.ac.uk
Adam Trickey
Adam is a medical statistician and mathematical modeller with an interest in investigating patterns of how infectious diseases are spread and interventions to reduce them – particularly relating to HIV and hepatitis among people who inject drugs.
Adam works with the Antiretroviral Therapy Cohort Collaboration (ART-CC), which investigates prognosis and behaviours among persons with HIV, including substance use.
Email: adam.trickey@bristol.ac.uk
