Mark Whitfield is a Reader in Substance Use within LJMU's Public Health Institute. He leads the Institute's Intelligence and Surveillance team who are commissioned to provide surveillance systems across England and Wales around their twin specialisms of injury prevention and substance use. In recent years he has overseen the roll-out of the IMS model for reviewing drug and alcohol related deaths to every local authority in the north-west of England along with Birmingham and Solihull.

Mark has a background in the field of drugs and alcohol having worked for 12 years within a local Mental Health NHS Trust, involving face to face work with people who use drugs in a needle exchange setting. Mark is the chair of the National Drug Related Deaths Intelligence Group.

Rick is Head of Substance Misuse and Vulnerable Populations for Public Health Wales. He is an Honorary Professor in the School of Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy at Swansea University, where he teaches as part of the postgraduate programme

Rick has been called ‘a key figure in the emerging field of human rights and drug policy’ and is known for his leading research and teaching on subjects including international drug control law, prisoners' rights, HIV and human rights, capital punishment and harm reduction. He is the former Executive Director of Harm Reduction International (2010-2018) and the Irish Penal Reform Trust (2003-2007). He is also the co-founder and Chair of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex.

Stephanie Hanlon is the Joint Regional Lead for Drugs and Alcohol at the HSC Public Health Agency (PHA) in Northern Ireland. She actively promotes public awareness regarding alcohol harms, drug safety, and mental health, frequently advising on responsible drinking during festive periods and, as reported in Pharmacy In Focus and Drugs and Alcohol NI, leading campaigns such as "Know Your Units".

Professor Catriona Matheson, Professor in Substance Use, University of Stirling and Independent Review Consultant in Substance Related Deaths, Aberdeen City Alcohol and Drug Partnership.

Catriona Matheson is a part time Professor in Substance Use at the University of Stirling, and independent Consultant Reviewer of Substance related Deaths in Aberdeen City. She Chaired the Drug Death Taskforce for Scotland (July 2019-December 2021).

Her research, spanning 30 years, is in the delivery of care to people who use drugs. She has over 80 peer reviewed publications and has contributed to and written several educational materials around managing drug use and drug harms.

Current interests include effective interventions for people who use street benzodiazepines, non-fatal overdose pathways and exploring digital solutions to prevent drug related harm.

Dr Caroline Copeland is a Senior Lecturer in Pharmacology & Toxicology at King’s College London, and the Director of the National Programme on Substance Use Mortality (NPSUM) (formerly known as the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths - NPSAD).

Dr Copeland heads a research group at King’s whose projects have the broad collective aim of improving healthcare strategies for people who use drugs. Current projects derived from the NPSUM range from the development of a wearable skin sensor to protect against opioid overdose, to the identification of drug-drug interactions between licensed medicines and illicit substances to prevent adverse effects. She has published over 30 research articles and successfully supervised 3 PhD students and over 40 MSc, MPharm and BSc student research projects.

Dr Copeland also sits on the Home Office’s Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs Novel Psychoactive Substances (ACMD NPS) Sub-Committee, and the Welsh National Implementation Board for Drug Poisoning Prevention (NIBDPP). In these roles Dr Copeland examines how national and international drug policy influences drug-related death trends.

Speaker biography to follow soon.

Dr Jo Kesten is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol Medical School.

Joanna’s research interests are the use of qualitative methods to understand ‘what works, for whom and in what circumstances’ in public health interventions. In particular her research explores the acceptability, feasibility and effectiveness of public health interventions. Joanna primarily uses qualitative methods in her research and is also interested in mixed methods research. Most of her research to date has been in the areas of child health and physical activity interventions.

Dr Jenny Scott is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol Medical School.

Dr Gabriele Vojt is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol Medical School.

Dr Hannah Family is a Research Fellow (Qualitative and Behavioural Science) at the University of Bristol Medical School.

Hannah is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in behavioural science and qualitative research with 16 years experience conducting health services research. Focussing on medicine use, illicit drug use, sexual and reproductive health.

Megan Glancy currently holds a Research Fellow position at Glasgow Caledonian University in the Blood-borne Virus research team and the Substance Use research team, and is an honorary Healthcare Scientist at Public Health Scotland.

Megan previously worked as a Data Manager at Public Health Scotland and as a Scientist at the UK Health Security Agency. She has an MSc in Applied Statistics from the University of Strathclyde and undertook a PhD at Glasgow Caledonian University under supervision of Dr Norah Palmateer, Professor Andy McAuley, and Professor Sharon Hutchinson.

Emmert is a Senior Clinical Lecturer in Addiction Psychiatry at the National Addiction Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) and a Consultant Addiction Psychiatrist at the South London and the Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust.

He graduated with distinctions in Medicine (BMBCh) from the University of Oxford, and Epidemiology (MSc) from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He holds a PhD in Addiction Sciences from KCL, his thesis exploring how specialist drug and alcohol treatment provision in England impacts on hospitalisation and mortality.

He is currently an NIHR Advanced Fellow and a Commonwealth Fund Senior Harkness Fellow and holds membership at both the Royal College of Physicians and Psychiatrists.

During the COVID-19 outbreak he founded the Homeless Hotel Drug and Alcohol Service (HDAS) the first pan-London service to provide drug, alcohol and tobacco support to the population of people experiencing rough sleeping who were temporarily housed in emergency accommodation across the capital.

Amy is Chief Executive Officer at Her Circle, the organisation delivers services for women at risk of child removal or who had experienced it. Her Circle is an organization which centres the women it works for, in the design of their service, and learning from their experiences www.hercirclene.co.uk.

Dr Richard Lowie is a Reader in Homelessness and Inclusion Health, at Edinburgh University's School of Health in Social Science. Richard is also an Honorary Clinical Pharmacist, NHS Lothian (The Access Place), and Lead Pharmacist Research and Development (NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde).

Kellie is a Public Health Practitioner at Newcastle City Council. Kellie has extensive experience from previous roles at Newcastle City Council, Humankind Charity, Change, Grow, Live (CGL) and Lifeline Project Ltd.

Dr Allison Ford is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Marketing and Health, University of Stirling. Specialising in qualitative methods, her research focuses on understanding health behaviours, the impact of marketing on health, evaluating health interventions and providing evidence for policy. She has conducted studies on tobacco prevention, cessation and harm reduction, alcohol use, bereavement from substance use, food marketing, and attitudes towards Covid-19 vaccination. She has a track record of conducting research with disadvantaged populations and leads the Scottish arm and mixed-methods process evaluation of an NIHR-funded RCT exploring e-cigarettes vs usual care for smoking cessation offered at homeless centres. She also leads a package of work on e-cigarettes and emerging nicotine products and their marketing, and a DHSC-funded study exploring women’s access and attitudes to contraception. She has been an investigator of the Youth Tobacco Policy Survey (now the Youth E-cigarettes Policy Survey) since 2013. In June 2022 Allison took over as the University of Stirling lead and Co-Investigator in the NIHR Public Health Policy Research Unit.

Allison sits on the University of Stirling's NHS, Invasive or Clinical Research (NICR) Ethics Committee. Previous roles include: Associate Editor for Nicotine and Tobacco Research; board member for the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco Europe; and module co-ordinator for the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies (UKCTAS)/SPECTRUM CPD – Nicotine and Tobacco: Current Issues, Policy and Practice.

Research Interests: Tobacco control, smoking cessation, adolescent smoking, tobacco and e-cigarette marketing, harm reduction, electronic cigarettes, qualitative research, vulnerable groups

Dr Karen Maxwell is a post-doctoral public health researcher at the University of Stirling, with an interest in reducing social inequalities. Karen is a Research Fellow in the Institute for Social Marketing & Health, working across a range of projects on substance use and alcohol. Karen previously worked in substance use and sexual health research at Glasgow Caledonian University, leading the qualitative work packages of various projects. Most recently, Karen led the qualitative arm of a Scottish Government funded project on improving population health by increasing early diagnosis of Blood Borne Viruses (BBVs) in Scotland, integrating expert review of evidence with stakeholder focus group work.

Prior to her work at Stirling, Karen worked at the MRC Social and Public Health Sciences Unit at the University of Glasgow for 10 years, conducting qualitative research across a broad range of public health topics, including sexual health, substance use, gender and health, parenting, and women's reproductive health. Her research interests focus on gender and social inequalities in health.

Research Interests: substance use, alcohol and societal harms, sexual health, women's health, vulnerable groups, qualitative methods, deliberative methods..

Dr Francesco Manca is a Research Associate at the University of Glasgow.

He joined the Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment (HEHTA) department at Glasgow University in 2018 as a Research Assistant. In 2024, he earned his PhD by published work in Public Health while working with HEHTA.

Currently, his research focus is on evaluations of public health interventions, with a specific interest in mental health, substance use disorder epidemiology and related policies. He works with longitudinal, linked datasets for observational and cohort studies. He also has experience in health economic evaluations of diagnostics and screening strategies across diverse disease areas, including alcohol misuse, infectious, and neglected tropical diseases.

Jim is Professor of Medical Statistics at Glasgow University, and is in the Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment research group within the School of Health and Wellbeing.

Jim has expertise in a broad range of medical statistics methodologies including modelling interrupted time series data and survival analysis. Jim is a Chartered Statistician (CStat), awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in 2010 and revalidated in 2018 and 2020.

Jim currently serves as a member of NIHR Public Health Research Programme Committee (since 2020) and previously served on the Chief Scientist Office Health Improvement, Protection and Services Research Committee (2016 – 2020).

Anyone’s Child: Families for Safer Drug Control amplifies the voices of those who have been directly impacted by drug policy failures and are now calling for the legal control and regulation of the drug market.

Read Alison's story here:https://anyoneschild.org/alison

Dr Judith Yates worked as a GP in Birmingham for thirty years. Since retiring from clinical work in 2015 she continued to work with Birmingham Coroner’s Office to monitor drug related deaths, and to look for ways to prevent future deaths.

Judith is a member of Doctors for Drug Policy Reform (D4DPR) and supports the development of evidence-based drug policy, locally, nationally, and internationally.