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.

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.

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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.

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