APSAD Awards Past Recipients

 

Left to Right: APSAD President Anthony (Tony) Gill; Gillian Gould; Nicholas Lintzeris; Billie Bonevski

 

 

A/Prof Gillian Gould has made a highly significant and unique contribution to AOD research into Indigenous smoking cessation as an early career researcher, obtaining her PhD in 2015. Gould’s PhD by publication was an outstanding contribution to understanding how anti-tobacco messages need to be targeted better to Indigenous communities and in particular, to pregnant smokers. Since moving to University of Newcastle (UON) in 2015, Gould achieved an extremely impressive track record by being awarded $5.5million in funding, and since the start of her PhD, published 39 peer-reviewed papers. She is currently funded by two prestigious research fellowships from NHMRC and Cancer Institute NSW (CINSW) until the end of 2018, and has already secured a NHMRC Translating Research Into Practice Fellowship co-funded by CINSW ($100,000) commencing in 2019. Gould established and leads a new research stream in Indigenous smoking for the School of Medicine and Public Health at UON on culturally competent approaches in the vital area of smoking cessation during pregnancy. Gould is highly effective at combining her extensive clinical experience as a general practitioner, a Tobacco Treatment Specialist and public health researcher to advance knowledge and find pragmatic solutions in this important area. She has worked intensively at a community level with Aboriginal people for several years to build trusted relationships, which allows her to co-develop many Indigenous tobacco programs.

 

 

 

 

Prof Lintzeris has been highly active for over a quarter of a century in drug and alcohol clinical service delivery, research, professional education and policy developments in Australia and has been a key leader in many important developments in our field across this time. He is Foundation Fellow of the Chapter of Addiction Medicine in the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. He has an international reputation as an expert in the drug and alcohol field with interests across opioids, cannabinoids, stimulants, alcohol, benzodiazepines and ‘new’ psychoactive substances. Prof Lintzeris graduated from the University of Tasmania (MBBS, B Med Sci) then worked in the public drug and alcohol sector in Victoria. He helped establish Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre as a lead NGO in the field in Victoria in the 1990s. He subsequently has led drug and alcohol services in South West Sydney, Sydney and South East Sydney Local Health Districts in NSW including important clinical service re-design and innovation. He has been Chief Addiction Medicine specialist for NSW Health, helping develop and implement a clinical outcomes and quality improvement process across public drug and alcohol services throughout NSW that is currently being implemented. He has been highly active in policy development for over two decades, sitting on numerous state and national committees and publishing multiple clinical guidelines in the field. Professor Lintzeris' PhD examined the use of buprenorphine in inpatient and outpatient opiate withdrawal and provided important data to enable the safe and effective rapid uptake of buprenorphine for withdrawal treatment in Australia. He has contributed to state and national opiate treatment guidelines in addiction treatment and played a lead role in the current national and NSW opiate treatment clinical guidelines. He was awarded the Neil Hamilton Fairley Clinical Research Post-doctoral Fellowship by the NH&MRC and led a pivotal RCT of injectable heroin treatment through the National Addiction Centre in the UK as well as psychopharmacological studies of opiates and benzodiazepines.

 

 

Professor Billie Bonevski is a health behaviour scientist and Professor at the University of Newcastle (UON), Faculty of Health and Medicine. She is a NHMRC Career Development Fellow (CDF Level 2: 2014-2018) and the recipient of the prestigious Faculty of Health and Medicine’s Gladys M Brawn Research Award. Bonevski completed a scholarship-supported PhD at the University of Newcastle, in the Discipline of Behavioural Science in Relation to Medicine after gaining a Psychology Honours degree (1st Class with WH Ward Prize for Best Applied Thesis). Immediately following her PhD she completed a World Health Organisation-sponsored postdoctoral travel fellowship with Cancer Research UK and the Cochrane Collaboration’s Tobacco Addiction Review Group, both based at Oxford University.

"She is a champion for health equity and an advocate for gender equity and this is reflected not only in her research outputs but in her approach to building the capacity of new researchers. Her supportive approach is highly effective; her students and mentees achieve remarkable success in their careers and progress to make substantial contributions to tobacco research and the community in general. She is an inspiring role model (her young female ECR twitter followers refer to her as their "research idol") not only for productivity and achieving career goals, but also for showing them how to ensure their research makes a meaningful difference to people's lives. Evidence of the effectiveness of her mentoring is in the metrics: she has supervised 19 students, 15 of those PhD students, all on PhD scholarships, and 7 winning awards for PhD excellence from their institutions (University of Newcastle, Monash) or national awards (eg, Council of Australian Public Health Institutions, Cancer Institute NSW)."

 The Mentor Award recognises an individual who has made an important contribution to mentoring and supporting the career development of clinicians, researchers or students