SIMAH Research Team | CAMH

SIMAH team at conference

SIMAH is an international collaboration between researchers at three world-leading centers in alcohol research and policy modelling, led by investigators at CAMH

Co-Investigators

		Jürgen 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 Alcohol Research Group, U.S. 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 PhD 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 University of Sheffield, U.K. 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. Dr. Purshouse’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. Dr. Purshouse 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. Dr. Purshouse 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 Alcohol Research Group, U.S. 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, Dr. Mulia 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 University of Sheffield, U.K. 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 behaviors. She has developed a dynamic microsimulation model of population alcohol use in the United States and has used this to explore the relationship beween 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, Dr. Buckley 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.

		Laura Llamosas-Falcón Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada Laura Llamosas-Falcón 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. She also completed a two-year post doctoral position at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at CAMH (Toronto, Canada). During her fellowship, she improved her statistical skills and conducted several meta-analysis and meta-regressions. Dr. Llamosas-Falcón is currently doing her PhD at the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. Her project focuses on the association between alcohol use and unintentional injuries mortality. She has experience in analyzing epidemiological data of alcohol use and alcohol-related harms. Dr. Llamosas-Falcón has worked and collaborated in international projects with The Pan American Health Organization.

		Carolin Kilian Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada 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 impact alcohol consumption and alcohol-related mortality as a function of gender and socioeconomic status. Her wider research interests concern public health policy, social determinants of health and alcohol’s harms to others than the alcohol user. She has previously been working at the Technische Universität Dresden (Germany) as part of several large-scale pan-European projects funded by the European Commission, and in collaboration with the European Office for Non-communicable Diseases of the World Health Organisation.

		Julia M. Lemp Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Canada Julia Lemp, MSc, is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at CAMH. Her current research centers on understanding the differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on alcohol consumption across population groups in the United States. Further, she will contribute to modeling the effects of alcohol policy interventions, particularly screening and brief interventions, using the SIMAH microsimulation model. She earned her Master’s degree in Psychology in 2019 and is expected to complete her PhD in Global Health from Heidelberg University in 2024. In her previous work, she applied quasi-experimental methods to analyze routine health data, providing valuable insights into the effectiveness of behavioral interventions in real-world settings. She has experience in conducting mixed-methods studies and in analysing epidemiological data on non-communicable diseases.

		Yachen Zhu Alcohol Research Group, U.S. Yachen Zhu, Ph.D., is a Biostatistician at the Alcohol Research Group, Public Health Institute. Dr. Zhu 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 brings her expertise in Statistics and Public Health into alcohol-related health studies.

		Sophie Bright University of Sheffield, UK Sophie Bright, MSc, is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield and Research Assistant on the SIMAH project. Her PhD is exploring how the key tenets of intersectionality theory can be used to inform microsimulation modelling. She is using quantitative intersectional methods to better understand alcohol consumption and harm at the intersections of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and age, and exploring how discriminatory structures (for example, structural racism and sexism) contribute to these differences. She will then explore how the SIMAH model may be adapted to reflect her findings. Prior to her PhD, Sophie worked as a Programmes Manager for NGOs in Sierra Leone, working in collaborative research partnerships across countries to achieve influence at a policy level. She holds a Master’s degree in Public Health from King’s College London.

		Yu Ye Alcohol Research Group, U.S. Yu Ye, M.A., is a Biostatistician at the Alcohol Research Group, Public Health Institute. Mr. Ye received his Master’s degree in Economics in University of Miami. Mr Ye joined the Alcohol Research Group in 2001 and served as staff biostatistician of the Statistical Core component of the National Alcohol Research Center at ARG since 2005. He has worked extensively in areas of alcohol measurements, racial/ethnic disparities, trend and age-period-cohort analysis and health risk of alcohol consumption. His research interests include epidemiological modeling of alcohol and injury relationship and alcohol-attributable fraction, panel data analysis, and causal inference approaches such as propensity score method, instrumental variable, and the difference-in-difference models.

		Aurélie Lasserre Addiction Medicine, Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland Aurélie M. Lasserre, MD, Ph.D., is a physician-scientist working in addiction medicine at the Department of Psychiatry of the Lausanne University Hospital. Her research focuses on the social determinants of mental health, specifically how socioeconomic status impacts alcohol use disorders, depression and suicide. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Mental Health Policy Research at CAMH and maintains an ongoing collaboration with them. Previously, during her Ph.D. at the Swiss School of Public Health, she investigated how the subtypes of depression and cardiometabolic risk factors, especially obesity, were interrelated in a population-based cohort, taking into account lifestyle factors. As a clinician, she is a trained psychiatrist and psychotherapist with expertise in treating individuals with comorbid substance use disorders with other mental disorders.