Awards
NDRI
Nicola Thomson completed her Curtin University PhD at NDRI’s Melbourne Office in April 2015 under the supervision of Professors David Moore and Suzanne Fraser.
Her PhD thesis, Making Methamphetamine: Enacting a Drug and its Consumers in Scientific Accounts, Personal Narratives and Service Provision, received an ‘A’ from both examiners. Nicola analysed in depth interviews with methamphetamine users and service providers, exploring the ways in which methamphetamine use is shaped by mainstream understandings of this drug as well as access to resources such as education, housing and employment.
Prior to undertaking her PhD, Nicola worked in the alcohol and other drug sector as an advocate and researcher. She is now working in research and policy at the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services.
NDARC
At NDARC, Katrina Champion, Clare McCormack, Gabrielle Campbell and Mark Deady were recently awarded PhDs.
Katrina Champion’s thesis, Paying Attention to Prevention: An Internet-based Framework to Address Alcohol, Cannabis, Ecstasy and New Psychoactive Substance Use, focused on the development and evaluation of the Internet-based Climate Schools substance use prevention programs. During her PhD, she developed the first online school-based program to prevent ecstasy and new psychoactive substance use and conducted a cluster randomised controlled trial in 11 secondary schools in Sydney to determine its efficacy.
Clare McCormack, in her thesis Prenatal Alcohol Exposure and Infant Cognitive Development, used data from the Triple B Study to investigate the epidemiology of alcohol use during pregnancy and its association with infant cognitive outcomes. Key findings included that alcohol use during pregnancy in Australia is common, particularly early in the first trimester prior to awareness of pregnancy; exposure to low levels of alcohol was not associated with impaired cognitive outcomes for children; and alcohol use by partners was strongly related to alcohol use by mothers. Later in 2016 Clare will take up a prestigious Reiner Postdoctoral Fellowship in Psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City.
In her thesis entitled, Complexities and cCmorbidities in Patients with Chronic Non-Cancer Pain: Suicidal Behaviours and Pharmaceutical Opioid Use, Gabrielle examined suicidality and comorbidity among people living with chronic non-cancer pain who are prescribed opioids, drawing on data from the POINT study, a national prospective cohort which follows 1,500 chronic pain patients who are prescribed pharmaceutical opioids.
Mark’s PhD project, Comorbid Depression and Problematic Alcohol Use in Young People: The Development and Evaluation of an Online Intervention involved the development of an internet-based, psychological intervention to treating co-occurring moderate depression and problematic alcohol use in young people (the DEAL Project). Mark is now working in mental health research at the Black Dog Institute at UNSW.
