SIMAH Research Team

Principal Investigator

Charlotte Probst,
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada

Charlotte Probst, PhD, is an Independent Scientist in CAMH’s Institute for Mental Health Policy Research and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychiatry at University of Toronto. In addition to her work at CAMH, Dr. Probst is a Research Group Lead at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health at Heidelberg University in Germany.

Her research is concerned with substance use, alcohol use in particular and addictions across large populations, with a focus on the social determinants of substance use and the broad impacts on society. With her research, Dr. Probst aims to understand the mechanisms underlying the growing socioeconomic inequalities in health, with a focus on alcohol-related outcomes from a global perspective and develop tangible intervention strategies to reduce socioeconomic inequalities in alcohol-related health burden.

Co-Investigators

Jurgen Rehm,
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada

Jürgen Rehm, PhD, is Senior Scientist in the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research and in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at CAMH. He is Professor and Inaugural Chair of Addiction Policy in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Rehm is a leader in generating and analyzing the scientific data needed to inform clinicians and policy-makers of strategies to reduce alcohol-, tobacco-, and other drug-related harm. His recent research has more and more included interactions between socio-economic status, poverty and substance use, including analysis of policies and interventions with respect to reducing or increasing inequalities. His work has been awarded with numerous awards and prizes, most importantly, the Jellinek Memorial Award (2003) and the European Addiction Research Award (2017).

William Kerr, PhD, is a senior scientist at the Alcohol Research Group (ARG), Public Health Institute, and is Director of ARG’s National Alcohol Research Center focused on the epidemiology of alcohol problems and alcohol-related disparities. Dr. Kerr received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California-Davis. Since joining the Alcohol Research Group in 2001 Dr. Kerr has pursued research in the areas of alcohol policy, measurement methodology, trends in US alcohol consumption and relationships between alcohol use patterns and health outcomes. Recent projects include analyses of inter-relationships between alcohol consumption patterns and health problems in a life-course perspective and health disparities related to alcohol. He is also involved in projects addressing alcohol’s harm’s from other use, evaluating impacts of policies targeting drinking during pregnancy, estimating disparities in alcohol policy responsiveness, disentangling economic influences on alcohol-related suicide risk and building agent-based simulation models of population alcohol use over the life course for policy testing.

Robin Purshouse, PhD, is Professor of Decision Sciences at the University of Sheffield. He led the CASCADE project that developed the foundational microsimulation methods and tools now being used and extended in SIMAH.

Robin’s research focuses on the development and application of advanced quantitative methods for informing population health policy. He has expertise in dynamical systems modelling, particularly exploring how agent-based models, capturing the bidirectional relationships between individuals and social structures, can explain change and stasis in population health outcomes over time.

Robin is interested in how psychosocial theories and evidential uncertainty can be incorporated into computer models to both explain and estimate the effect of policy. He has pioneered machine learning methods that fuse theory with data to discover competing explanations for observed long-term population trends in alcohol use in the USA.

Robin holds an MEng in Control Systems Engineering (1999) and a PhD in Control Systems (2004). Before returning to academia in 2008, he worked as a management consultant at PA Consulting Group. He was recipient of an ESRC Future Research Leaders award (2012-2014). He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on agent-based modelling and decision systems at the University of Sheffield.

Nina Mulia, DrPH, is a senior scientist and associate director of the National Alcohol Research Center at the Alcohol Research Group (ARG), Public Health Institute in Emeryville, California.

She specializes in racial, ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in alcohol consumption, problems and access to alcohol services, and utilizes quantitative and qualitative methods in her research. Her most recent studies have examined longitudinal associations between life course socioeconomic conditions and subsequent alcohol use patterns, and effects of health care reform on alcohol treatment utilization in racial and ethnic groups.

Prior to joining ARG, Nina was involved in HIV prevention and intervention research with drug users. She studied behavioral biology (BA) at the Johns Hopkins University, Public Health Policy and Management (MPH) at the University of Michigan, and completed a DrPH in Community Health Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley.

Researchers

Charlotte Buckley, PhD, is a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. Her research is focused on the development and utilization of advanced quantitative methods to understand and explore population-level health behaviours. She has developed a dynamic microsimulation model of population alcohol use in the United States and has used this to explore the relationship between alcohol use and liver cirrhosis. This model is being extended on the SIMAH project, to investigate associations between socioeconomic inequalities, alcohol use and mortality.

Prior to joining the University of Sheffield, Charlotte received her PhD from the School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol. Her wider interests are in incorporating psychological factors into complex systems models of health behaviours and outcomes.

Klajdi Puka, PhD, is a Project Scientist at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at CAMH, and an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Western University. Dr. Puka’s research focuses on investigating modifiable factors of health outcomes and randomized trials. Specifically, he has focused on modeling mental health outcomes over time and examining their interactions with clinical characteristics, family environment, health behaviours, and socioeconomic status. This work has been used to inform his second line of research, focused on the implementation and evaluation of behavioural interventions through randomized control trials. The application of advanced quantitative methods and methods-development work are important aspects of his research program.

Yu Ye,
Alcohol Research Group, US

Aurélie Lasserre, MD, PhD, is a physician scientist, working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at CAMH. Her research focuses on the social determinants in mental health. Particularly, how socioeconomic status affects alcohol use disorders and depression. Previously, she has examined how the subtypes of depression and cardiometabolic risk factors were interrelated in a population-based cohort, taking into account behavioral risk factors such as tobacco, dietary patterns, alcohol use and physical activity.

She is a trained psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and has worked in general psychiatry and addiction medicine at the Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland. She has expertise in the treatment of people with comorbid substance use disorder with another mental disorder, such as depression or personality disorder.

Laura Llamosas-Falcón, MD, MPH, studied Medicine at the University of Cantabria. In 2021, she finished her residency and specialized in Preventive Medicine and Public Health. As part of it, she completed a Master Degree in Public Health.

Dr. Llamosas-Falcón currently holds the position of post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at CAMH (Toronto, Canada). During her fellowship, she will improve her statistical skills and conduct several meta-analysis and meta-regressions.

She has experience in analyzing epidemiological data of alcohol use and alcohol-related harms. Dr. Llamosas-Falcon has worked and collaborated in international projects with The Pan American Health Organization.

Carolin Kilian, PhD, holds a post-doctoral research fellow position at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at CAMH. Her research focuses on how alcohol policy interventions influence alcohol consumption as a function of gender and socioeconomic status.

In her previous research, Dr. Kilian studied the role of gender and socioeconomic status on alcohol consumption and alcohol-related mortality. She has been working in different pan-European projects and in collaboration with the European Office of the World Health Organization.

Yachen Zhu, PhD, is a Biostatistician at the Alcohol Research Group, Public Health Institute. Yachen received her Ph.D. in Public Health with a concentration on Global Health from the University of California, Irvine. She obtained her Master's degree in Applied Statistics and Bachelor's degree in Statistics from the University of Science and Technology of China. In her doctoral dissertation, she used advanced statistical techniques to investigate the impacts of environmental risk factors on susceptible populations in the US. She has experience implementing Monte Carlo simulations and Approximate Bayesian Computation for complex environmental and pharmacokinetic models. She will bring her expertise in Statistics and Public Health into alcohol-related health studies.

Tessa is a third-year undergraduate student in the Honours Biology and Pharmacology program at McMaster University, who is additionally pursuing a minor in Mental Health and Addiction. She is a co-op student at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

Tessa has a broad range of research interests in both basic and clinical research. Her basic research experiences include investing the influence of the oncogene, OIP5, on cell proliferation in hepatocellular carcinoma. Her clinical research experience has explored the effects of COVID-19 on the social determinants of health and the effectiveness of psychosocial supports on the physical, psychological, and social outcomes of pediatric cancer patients. She now hopes to combine her knowledge and experiences to gain a better understanding of the relationship between socioeconomic inequalities and alcohol-related mortality through her work on the SIMAH project.