Member profiles

Professor Jo Barnes

Jo Barnes is Professor in Herbal Medicines at the School of Pharmacy. She previously held teaching and research positions at the Centre for Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy, University of London, UK, and the Department of Complementary Medicine, University of Exeter, UK. Jo’s research interests broadly include the utilisation, quality, efficacy and safety of natural health products (complementary /alternative medicines), particularly herbal and other traditional medicines. She has specific interests in pharmacovigilance of herbal medicines, in developing novel or modified methods to monitor the safety of natural health products, and in natural health products used in smoking cessation. Jo is an honorary consultant to the WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring and is a member of its herbal safety signal review panel. She is an Associate Editor ofPhytochemistry Letters, and on the editorial boards of Drug Safety, International Journal of Pharmacy Practice, and Phytotherapy Research

Deputy Head of School
Email: j.barnes@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 3069

Dr Amy Chan

Dr Amy Chan is a senior research fellow jointly appointed with the University of Auckland and Auckland District Health Board, and one of the leads of the Academic Practice Unit (APU), a unit which aims to increase clinical research capacity and capability, and boost knowledge mobilisation, with a focus on medicines and health outcomes. Amy also holds an honorary post with the University College London, UK and Asthma UK Centre of Applied Research (AUKCAR).  Amy’s expertise is in exploring data patterns and medicines-related behaviour, and the role of digital technologies in improving health behaviours and outcomes.  Amy has nearly 15 years’ experience in the public health service, where she led one of the clinical pharmacy services at ADHB, and was involved in health service delivery research. She is also the global lead for workforce transformation for the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP), Professional Development and Research Lead for the Commonwealth Pharmacists’ Association, and on the board for Asthma New Zealand.

Senior Research Fellow
Email: a.chan@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 4730

Dr Andi Crawford

He tangata tiriti ahau.  Nō Czech Republic, Scotland, Switzerland, Prussia, Ireland, England ōku tīpuna.

Andi Crawford is a Clinical Psychologist and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychological Medicine.  Andi recently completed her post-doc which explored pathways to support children, mothers, and their families who have experienced prenatal alcohol and drug exposure.  Andi has 20 years’ of experience working in child development, child and adolescent mental health, maternal mental health and addiction services.  She currently works for Te Ara Manapou (Pregnancy and Parenting Service, Te Whatu Ora – Te Matau a Māui) providing support for pregnant women and parents of young children who experience addiction and mental health challenges.  Currently, she is the Tangata Tiriti co-lead for the development of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Diagnostic Guidelines in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Honorary Research Fellow
Email: andi.crawford@auckland.ac.nz

Dr Louise Curley

Louise Curley is a pharmacist and Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy practice at the School of Pharmacy. Louise’s area of research focuses on the effects of recreational drug use in humans. She began her research as an undergraduate by investigating the subjective and electrophysiological effects of the Party Pill drugs BZP using electroencephalography (EEG) and graduated with a PhD in pharmacy in 2012. Her thesis investigated the effects of the main constituents of “Party Pills” benzylpiperazine (BZP) and trifluromethylphenylpiperazine (TFMPP) on executive functioning and reward using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Currently, her focus is developing new fMRI paradigms to investigate different aspects of risk, specifically by comparing populations of dependent versus non-dependent participants.

Senior Lecturer
Email: l.curley@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 2255

Sarah Haldane

Sarah is a Professional Teaching Fellow, in the School of Nursing. Her professional interest lies in improving the care for tangata whaiora with co-existing problems within our mental health and addiction services.

Professional teaching fellow
Email: sarah.haldane@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 5224

Gayl Humphrey

Gayl Humphrey is a Research Fellow and Co-Lead for the Health Informatics and Technology Programme, at the National Institute for Health Innovation at the University of Auckland. Her research is focused on identifying, designing and trialling opportunities for using mHealth innovations as enablers to enhance health outcomes in the context of people experiencing harms from addictions and from other non-communicable diseases.  She has undertaken research on digitalising an alcohol brief intervention in primary care and has explored the role of mobile phone geolocation capability to support relapse prevention amongst people experiencing gambling harms by avoiding risky locations.   With colleagues, she recently completed a large RCT to test the efficacy of a mobile CBT programme for problem gamblers.

Research Fellow
Email: g.humphrey@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 9129

Kate Kersey

Dr Bodo Lang

​Bodo’s career draws on his experience from both the commercial and academic sectors. His commercial career spans advertising (Germany), management consulting (New Zealand) and market research (Singapore). The other half of Bodo’s career has been in academia including several senior management roles. He is currently an Associate Professor in marketing, Lead of the Disciplinary Area “Strategic Marketing and Market Innovation”, and Assistant Dean – External Engagement in the Business School at the University of Auckland.

A function of Bodo’s applied industry background, his research focuses on the intersection of academic rigour and practical relevance. Bodo’s research consists of two broad streams. Firstly, he publishes in marketing journals on contemporary topics such as marketing communication and services marketing, often with a strong consumer focus. His second stream of research is cross-disciplinary in nature, working in partnership with colleagues from the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences (FMHS). This research sits at the interface of public health and marketing and focuses on using marketing techniques for social marketing purposes (“using marketing for public good”), particularly within the contexts of alcohol, sugary beverages, and vaping.

Senior Lecturer
Email: b.lang@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 7162

Associate Professor Judith McCool

Judith McCool is Associate Professor, Head of School of Population Health and co-Director for Centre for Pacific and Global Health. Judith’s research interests include, global health, tobacco control, social media, and social determinants of health. She has been a lead investigator on international tobacco control research projects, and is currently co-PI on a survey mental health in Samoa, tobacco industry interference in the Pacific region; primary supervisor for PhD projects including e-cigarette marketing in NZ, digital health and Pacific wellbeing.

Associate Professor
Email: j.mccool@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 2372

Associate Professor Suresh Muthukumaraswamy

Suresh Muthukumarswamy is an Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy and is funded in by a Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Discovery Fellowship. Suresh’s research interests are in using brain imaging techniques (MEG/MRI/EEG) to measure the effects of drugs on the brain and behaviour. He has conducted brain imaging investigations of a number of recreational drugs including ketamine, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and LSD.

Associate Professor
Email: sd.muthu@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 5398

Dr Rhys Ponton

Rhys Ponton is a registered pharmacist and has an extensive history in the treatment of drug misuse. His PhD research involved the characterisation of the processes that drug users in the UK use to prepare heroin and crack cocaine injections. He sat as the pharmacist representative on the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs in the UK chaired by Prof David Nutt. His research interests include the methods used to consume drugs and the risks they pose, prescription and over-the-counter drug misuse, and worldwide drug policy. ​

Senior Lecturer
Email: r.ponton@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 7084

Dr Rodrigo Ramalho

Dr Rodrigo (Rama) Ramalho is the Academic Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Health Sciences in Alcohol and Drug Studies and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Community Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. He holds a PhD in Population Health from the University of Auckland, and he also qualified as a medical doctor and a psychiatrist after gaining degrees at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción in Paraguay. Rama is a psychiatrist and population health scientist with a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach. His main research interests include global mental health, addiction, e-mental health, and cultural safety in mental health and addictions. He is also interested in academic inequities, which particularly affect the Global South.

Senior Lecturer
Email: r.ramalho@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 1443

Dr Ryan San Diego

Ryan San Diego, PhD (Health Psychology, the University of Auckland) is both a practising clinician and a lecturer at the Social and Community Health Unit, School of Population Health/ coordinator of the alcohol & the drugs curriculum at the undergraduate medical programme. Ryan’s PhD involved analyses of developmental risk factors (prenatal, social, and parent smoking and alcohol consumption) in young children’s neurodevelopment, in particular, associations with early executive function and socio-emotional development. Currently, as a behavioural science researcher, he is working and developing research themes in AOD-related areas such as a) Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) skills development in the undergraduate medical programme, b) culture-based/ diversity adaptations in AOD-specific psycho-social interventions, c) illness-recovery in addiction and mental health, and d) mood problems, smoking and drinking patterns in early-onset dementia in aged care settings. Ryan employs a range of methodologies (multivariate analyses, qualitative analyses, and neuropsychological methods) to investigate issues pertinent to addiction and mental health.

Lecturer
Email: r.sandiego@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 8510

Dr Fiona Sing

Fiona Sing is a Research Fellow and completed her PhD in 2022 studying how regulatory mechanisms can restrict the exposure of children to unhealthy food and beverage marketing under the supervision of Prof. Boyd Swinburn and Dr Sally Mackay. She has a Bachelor of Laws with Honours and a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and a MSc in Global Health from the London School of Economics. She previously worked as a public law lawyer and at World Cancer Research Fund International as the Policy and Public Affairs Manager. Her current research focus working with Prof. Lyons, and her consulting work for UNICEF, the World Health Organization, Deakin University and others, focuses on aiding governments to design legislation to restrict harmful commodity marketing, particularly digital marketing.

Research Fellow
Email: f.sing@auckland.ac.nz

Dr Suzanne Stevens

Dr Suzanne Stevens is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine. Her research focuses on maternal mental health, substance use and the home environment, to better understand how risk and protective factors operate and interact to affect children’s social, behavioural, cognitive and neurodevelopment. She recently completed a pilot study investigating maternal lifestyle factors in pregnancy, focusing on prenatal alcohol exposure, early infant development and bio-behavioural markers of risk. Suzanne also works closely with Professor Trecia Wouldes on the longitudinal NZ Infant Development, Environment and Lifestyle (IDEAL) Study examining the effects of prenatal methamphetamine use on mothers and the development of their children.

Senior Lecturer
Email: s.stevens@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 4511

Dr Kris Taylor

Kris Taylor is a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland – a researcher who thrives in inter-disciplinary and theoretically informed spaces, Kris’s PhD research focused on ideas of pornographic harm, and the ways in which conceptualizing pornography viewing as addictive works across different spheres of knowledge (social, cultural, historical, and personal). Specifically,  his work on the deployment of an addiction self-diagnosis asks questions about the medicalisation of problematic behaviours, the circulation of therapeutic knowledge between expert and lay fields (especially online), as well as knowledge production and application more broadly. Kris is currently working on developing innovative gendered violence prevention tools and working with young men in Aotearoa around issues of harm, ethics, and social justice

Research fellow
Email: kris.taylor@auckland.ac.nz

Professor Malcolm Tingle

Malcolm Tingle is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology & Clinical Pharmacology in the School of Medical and Health Sciences. His research has focussed on the role of metabolism in toxicology and the development of in vitro and in vivo models to assess toxicity. In the field of addiction research, he has examined the pharmacokinetics of ‘party-pill’ constituents BZP & TFMPP and their potential for drug-drug intreactions.  He is jointly supervising a PhD student’s research investigating the pharmacokinetics of cytisine, a natural smoking cessation product and attempting to relate pharmacokinetics to the pharmacodynamic effects of this drug.

Professor
Email: m.tingle@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 4949

Professor Trecia Wouldes

Trecia Wouldes is a developmental psychologist and Professor in the Department of Psychological Medicine. Her main research and teaching interests are the development of infants at risk from prenatal drug exposure, and infant mental health. She completed the first systematic study in New Zealand on the effect of maternal methadone maintenance treatment on the physiological and psychological development of the fetus, the neonate and the infant.  Trecia is a co-investigator on a longitudinal study at the University of Canterbury investigating the neurological outcomes of infants born to mothers who were receiving methadone maintenance treatment for opiate dependence during their pregnancy. She is also the Director of the Auckland site of the Infant, Development Environment And Lifestyle (IDEAL) Study investigating the development of children born to mothers who used methamphetamine (P, Pure, Ecstasy, BZP) during pregnancy, led by Drs LaGasse and Lester at the Brown Center for the Study of Children at Risk, Rhode Island. She is currently involved in developing new research that will investigate early biological and behavioural markers of prenatal alcohol exposure.

Professor
Email: t.wouldes@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 6221

Sam White

Sam White is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland, evaluating the University of Auckland Addiction Workforce Development Programme. Sam also works for Odyssey House as a General Manager (Improvement and Development),and has a consulting role to the CAMHAS service in Hauraki Coromandel (Waikato DHB) providing support for AOD clinicians working with adolescents and their whanau needing support to address AOD concerns. She has also held roles in Adult Mental Health and Addictions services.

Doctoral Candidate – Doctor of Philosophy
Email: s.white@auckland.ac.nz
Phone: +64 (0) 9 923 2823