Team
Find out more about members of the Sheffield Addictions Research Group by viewing the individual profiles below.
You can also find out about our PhD students and their research.
To contact us please email sarg@sheffield.ac.uk.
Professor John Holmes
Director
John a is Professor in Alcohol Policy and Director of the Sheffield Addictions Research Group in SCHARR.
His research focuses on alcohol epidemiology and the analysis of alcohol policy options. He is particularly interested in patterns, trends and inequalities in alcohol consumption or alcohol-related harm and in using multi-method studies, including mathematical modelling, to address alcohol policy questions. His more recent work focuses on analysing gambling policy using similar methods.
Professor Alan Brennan
Lead Modeller
Alan is Professor of Health Economics and Decision Modelling in SCHARR.
He leads a large group of around 35 academic staff, undertaking methodological and applied research and consultancy using mathematical modelling in health and healthcare.
Julie Johnson
Research Group Manager
Julie works with the SARG team on strategy, research development and team management.
Professor Colin Angus
Professor of Alcohol Policy
Colin is Professor of Alcohol Policy in the Sheffield Addictions Research Group.
His work focuses on the design, development and adaptation of complex health economic models and their use to appraise key policy questions in the field of alcohol research.
Lucy Burke
Qualitative Research Associate
Lucy is a mixed-methods researcher, with a particular interest in understanding the impact of alcohol policy on health and health inequalities from a behavioural science perspective.
Prior to coming to Sheffield, she was a research fellow in the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of York, undertaking applied health and social care research.
Lucy works part-time as a Qualitative Research Associate in the Sheffield Addictions Research Group, where she is currently working on a project investigating how to design alcohol product labels to effectively communicate alcohol's harms to health. This complements her PhD studies where she is interested in the reasons people drink alcohol, and whether this is important when considering the potential public health impact of alcohol-free and low-alcohol drinks.
Dr Esther Chanakira
Research Associate
Esther joined the University of Sheffield in October 2024 as a Research Associate in Public Health Economic Modelling. She is currently working on the UKRI funded Local Health and Global Profits project.
Dr Amber Copeland
Research Fellow
Amber has been at the University of Sheffield since 2018, joining the School of Medicine and Population Health in 2025.
She recently secured funding from Wellcome to develop a new computational model to explore how
environmental factors influence people's attempts to reduce their alcohol consumption, and to use this model to appraise novel alcohol policies. The modelling infrastructure she develops will be adaptable to other public health challenges, including diet, vaping, and gambling.
Amber's background is in Psychology, and her research has largely focused on understanding the cognitive mechanisms that underlie behaviour change and recovery from addiction, with applications to alcohol, nicotine, and cannabis use.
Dr Laura Fenton
Research Fellow
Laura joined the Sheffield Addictions Research Group in 2021 as a Qualitative Research Associate.
She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester. Her PhD thesis examined the changing place of alcohol in the day-to-day lives of three generations of British women.
Before joining SCHARR she worked at the University of Manchester on the ESRC funded Girlhood and Later Life project (PI: Professor Penny Tinkler), which explored the youth transitions of women born in the United Kingdom between 1939-52, and the implications of youth experiences for later life.
Her research interests include youth, life course, generation, gender and creative methods. At SARG, she has explored these interests across several studies, including studies on: the decline in youth drinking; pregnant women's and young people's practices and experiences of no and low alcohol products; and the implications of the cost-of-living crisis and alcohol duty reforms for various groups.
Professor Matt Field
Professor of Psychology
Matt conducts research into the psychological mechanisms that underlie alcohol problems and other addictions. He is particularly interested in the roles of decision-making and impulse control in addiction, recovery, and behaviour change more broadly.
Dr Duncan Gillespie
Senior Research Fellow
Duncan's research focuses on supporting decision-makers to implement effective and equitable policy and interventions, by predicting their likely health, economic and wider societal effects and finding new ways to communicate uncertainty-laden choices.
He coordinates a programme of tobacco and nicotine policy research examining the behavioural, social and commercial factors driving tobacco and nicotine use, and the health and economic impacts of policy responses. This includes leading development of the Sheffield Tobacco and Alcohol Modelling Platform (STAPM), through which he also supports the programme of alcohol research and modelling.
Duncan is committed to open and reproducible research. He leads teams developing coding and data systems that make mathematical modelling for public health economics efficient, transparent, reusable and shareable across projects, and supervises PhD students across policy modelling, behavioural science and applied health economics.
Anne Greaves
Research Administrator / PA to John Holmes
Anne joined SARG in 2023 and provides administrative and communications support across the whole team.
She has a background in website management and digital communications in the third sector and NHS.
Dr Shangshang Gu
Research Associate
Shang is a Wellcome Transition Fund Research Associate. Her recently completed PhD explored the coevolution of alcohol use and social network dynamics among first-year university students in the UK.
She is particularly interested in longitudinal social network analysis and agent-based modelling, to investigate social mechanisms and to simulate the impact of network-based interventions on behaviours.
Dr Charlotte Head
Research Associate
Charlotte (Charlie) joined the department in 2024, funded on a UKRI project entitled Public Health Improvement UK, Local Health and Global Profits working alongside Esther Chanakira.
Her main research interests are in public health, modelling and human geography, focusing on GIS and small-area estimation methods.
Ryan Kai Le Chen
Research Assistant
Ryan joined SARG in September 2022 as a Research Assistant in quantitative methods.
Xinyi Kou
Research Associate
Xinyi is a Research Associate in Advanced Population Health Modelling and Simulation, currently contributing to the SIMAH project.
Grace Leeming
Research Assistant
Grace joined SARG in September 2022 as a Research Assistant in quantitative methods.
Dr Ellen McGrane
Research Associate
Ellen is a Research Associate in Alcohol and Public Health, working within the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Addictions and contributing to several gambling-related projects as part of the UKRI research programme on gambling. She previously completed a PhD examining the impact of gambling advertising during live sports.
With a background in economics and health economics, Ellen is interested in applying quantitative econometric methods to address public health questions relating to alcohol and gambling.
Dr Merve Mollaahmetoglu
Lecturer
Merve is a Lecturer (Teaching & Scholarship) based in the Psychology Department.
She completed a PhD funded by the Society for the Study of Addiction focusing on psychological risk factors for alcohol use disorders (AUD) and mechanisms of a novel treatment for AUD.
Her current research interests include the public health impacts of no- and low-alcohol drinks, particularly among hazardous/harmful drinkers and individuals with AUD or those in recovery from AUD.
Esther Moore
PhD Student / Research Associate
Esther is a Research Associate in Alcohol and Public Health at the Policy Research Unit in Addictions. She is interested in using public health economic models to evaluate policies related to alcohol, tobacco/nicotine, and gambling. She is also currently undertaking a PhD in Public Health Economics and Decision Science and her project focuses on developing a public health economic model that can be used to evaluate gambling policies.
Dr Damon Morris
Research Fellow
Damon is currently involved in research using economic modelling and econometric analysis to assist the development of the Sheffield Tobacco and Alcohol Policy Model (STAPM) and understand the impacts of alcohol and tobacco consumption on the wider economy and work outcomes.
Dr Parvati Perman-Howe
Research Associate
Parvati joined the University of Sheffield in 2023 as a Research Associate within SARG.
She works on three projects that look at the public health impact of no- and low-alcohol drinks; the market for, and public health impact of, mid-strength drinks; and the impact of reforms to the UK alcohol duty system. She also coordinates Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) activities across a number of SARG projects.
Her interests include harm prevention from alcohol, tobacco and mental illness; reducing health inequalities; and public involvement in research.
Professor Robin Purshouse
Professor of Decision Sciences
Robin is a modeller with a background in engineering.
He was a principal architect of the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model, alongside Alan Brennan, Rachid Rafia, and Petra Meier.
He is PI on the CASCADE project and a senior manager on the SIPHER project.
Professor Hazel Squires
Professor of Health-Related Decision Modelling
Hazel joined SCHARR in 2005 after completing a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Sheffield and an MSc in Operational Research from Lancaster University.
Since joining SCHARR, she has undertaken modelling projects for NICE, the Department of Health, the NHS Cancer Screening Programme and the pharmaceutical industry. A large part of this work has been around Public Health interventions and cancer screening, diagnosis and treatment. In 2010 – 2013 she developed a framework for helping modellers develop the structure of Public Health economic models as part of a NIHR doctoral research fellowship.
She is currently undertaking an NIHR Advanced Fellowship, exploring methods for incorporating behaviour into health economic models of Public Health interventions.
She contributes to PhD and Masters programmes in SCHARR including being one of the Supervisors of the Wellcome Doctoral Training Centre in Public Health Economics and Decision Science and deputy module lead of Advanced Simulation Methods.
Dr Abi Stevely
Research Fellow
Abi is a Research Fellow whose research focuses on alcohol epidemiology, public health policy evaluation, and reducing health inequalities.
They are particularly interested in applying advanced quantitative methods, including time series analysis, to analyse patterns in alcohol use and policy-relevant natural experiments.
Dr Luke Wilson
Research Fellow
Luke is a Research Fellow with research interests in the economics of alcohol/tobacco consumption and taxation.
His work focuses on the design, development, and implementation of public health outcomes to appraise key policy questions using applied microeconomics.
He currently works on numerous projects in SARG: including Evaluating and responding to the public health impact of no and low alcohol drinks: A multi-method study of a complex intervention in a complex system and Reducing alcohol harms during a cost-of-living crisis: Evaluating the impact of alcohol duty reforms across Great Britain.