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.
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.
Colin Angus
Senior Research Fellow
Colin a Senior Research Fellow in the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group within ScHARR.
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.
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.
Zoe Clarke
NIHR SPHR Pre-doctoral Fellow
Zoe joined the School of Medicine and Population Health in 2023 as a NIHR School of Public Health Pre-doctoral Fellow.
She previously worked for Public Health England (PHE) and later the Office of Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) on the topics of alcohol and gambling. She was a key member of the research team for the PHE evidence review on gambling-related harm and her final role was as the national evidence and delivery lead for gambling.
Prior to this, she worked in public health practice at a local level in Scotland and delivered frontline services, primarily for drug and alcohol issues and sexual health.
Dr Amber Copeland
Research Associate
Amber is a Research Associate based in the Department of Psychology.
She is currently applying computational models of value-based decision-making (VBDM) to investigate the potential mechanisms that underlie behaviour change and recovery from addiction.
Dr Laura Fenton
Research Associate
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 how to support decision makers to implement effective and equitable policy and interventions. This requires predicting their likely health, economic and wider societal effects, and thinking of new ways to present the outputs in terms of uncertainty-laden choices.
His current work in this area is mainly on tobacco and alcohol policy in the UK, where patterns of consumption are changing rapidly. He is interested in opportunities to develop work in the area of cancer prevention, screening and improvement of outcomes. He is also interested in developing this research in a global health context.
Duncan is committed to developing open and reproducible code and software and works primarily in the R environment. He is particularly interested in new ways to engineer mathematical modelling code to make it efficient, communicable and reusable across projects.
Dr Maria Hanini
Research Associate
Maria joined SARG in 2023 as a health economic modeller, focusing primarily on alcohol.
Charlotte Head
Research Associate
Charlotte joined the department in 2024, funded on a UKRI project entitled Public Health Improvement UK, Local Health and Global Profits working alongside Esther Chanakira. Charlotte is currently finishing her PhD researching antimicrobial resistance from the University of York. Her main research interests are in public health and data science, especially the use of big data to inform health decision-making and the implementation of One-Health policies.
Ryan Kai Le Chen
Research Assistant
Ryan joined SARG in September 2022 as a Research Assistant in quantitative methods.
Dr Inge Kersbergen
Lecturer
Inge is a Lecturer funded by the Society for the Study of Addiction Griffith Edwards Academic Fellowship scheme.
Her research interests are social and environmental influences on health behaviour (primarily alcohol consumption). She is also interested in weight stigma and its effects on health.
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.
Ellen McGrane
PhD Student / Research Associate
Ellen's PhD explores the impact of gambling advertising during live sports on gambling behaviour in men. It also investigates the impact of voluntary advertising bans on the presence of gambling advertising on television.
Her background is in economics and health economics. She has a broad interest in quantitative econometric methods and analysis of policy.
Ellen works part time as a Research Associate in alcohol and public health alongside her PhD.
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 Associate
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 two projects that look at the effect of alcohol minimum unit pricing (MUP) on harmful drinkers, and the public health impact of no- and low-alcohol drinks.
Her interests include harm prevention from alcohol, tobacco and mental illness; reducing health inequalities; and public involvement in research.
Dr Robert Pryce
Research Fellow
Rob joined the University of Sheffield in September 2015 as a Research Associate working within SARG.
He completed his PhD in Health Economics at Lancaster University, where his thesis covered the demand for alcohol.
He is mostly interested in the economics of alcohol, although he has a broad interest in the economics of addiction and addictive behaviours including smoking, drug use and gambling.
He has a general interest in all areas of Health Economics, as well as Labour Economics, Education Economics and Applied Microeconometrics.
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.
Dr Hazel Squires
Senior Research Fellow
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 Directors of the Wellcome Doctoral Training Centre in Public Health Economics and Decision Science and module lead of Advanced Simulation Methods.
Dr Abi Stevely
Research Fellow
Abi is a Research Fellow funded by the NIHR SPHR Post-doctoral Launching Fellowships scheme.
They are also working on a project evaluating the public health impact of no- and low-alcohol drinks.
Abi's research focuses on alcohol epidemiology, public health policy evaluation, and reducing health inequalities.
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.
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.