People

Peter Rice, chair of the Institute of Alcohol Studies, is an addiction psychiatrist based in Scotland. He graduated from Glasgow University and his post graduate training was in Glasgow, Perth and Dundee. He has been chair of Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems, a project of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, since 2012. He was one of the group of doctors from the Scottish Royal Colleges who founded SHAAP in 2006 to raise awareness of the extent and diversity of alcohol related harm and promote effective policy solutions initially within Scotland and subsequently in the UK, Europe and internationally.

He is:

• Chair of Tayside Council on Alcohol (a local alcohol charity)
• Alcohol policy lead for RCPsych (UK)
• A member of the UK Alcohol Health Alliance,
• Vice chair of the European Alcohol Policy Alliance (Eurocare)
• Board Member of the Institute of Alcohol Studies (UK)
• Consultant to WHO Europe.
• He is past chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Scotland and of the RCPsych Trainees Committee.

From 1989-2013 he worked in an NHS Alcohol Problems Service seeing patients on his own caseload and working with colleagues and partner agencies. He applied population health principles to his clinical service with a focus on prevention, early intervention and care pathways and this led to increasing involvement in formal policy work particularly since 2013. His work with the Royal College of Psychiatrists focused on the impact of mental and behavioural health to population health and health inequalities.

He has researched and published on health information and communication, brief interventions, on counselling relationship in alcohol misuse treatment as well as on more traditional medical topics such as cell changes in oral cancer. He has published in the British Medical Journal, the Lancet, the British Journal of Psychiatry, Addicition and Alcohol and Alcoholism on alcohol harm and policy.

He was part of the SHAAP group who developed the proposal for Minimum Unit Pricing in 2007, which was adopted by the Scottish Government, became law in 2012 and introduced in 2018. He is currently involved in the process of implementation of Minimum Unit Price in Scotland and other countries, and other prevention work in Scotland, the UK and elsewhere in Europe.

A minister of religion and an academic (retired but still active), Janet is vice chair of the Institute of Alcohol Studies. After 10 years with the police service and a brief career in personnel with a national retailer, she trained for the Baptist ministry through Bristol University.

Before ordination she went on to Oxford where she studied for her D.Phil. From 1989 to January 1994 she served a Baptist Church near Bristol and taught Old Testament part-time at her old theological college.

She then joined Westminster College, Cambridge and transferred into United Reformed Church ministry in 1996. She retired in 2016 but still remains active in the church and university as a minister and teacher. She currently serves as a Trustee of three other charitable organisations connected with the church and higher education.

Michael Carr enjoyed a long career in senior management posts in Higher Education, including as Registrar of the University of Liverpool from 1990 to 2004 and as the inaugural executive director of the Russell Group of Universities until 2007.

Following retirement from Higher Education, Michael spent a number of years as chairman of a large Foundation Hospital NHS Trust in the North West of England.

His commitment to the Institute of Alcohol Studies builds upon that of his father, Douglas Carr, who was a founding member of the Institute and a lifelong member of the Temperance Movement.

Michael is a former chair of the Institute of Alcohol Studies.

Stephen has worked for the Methodist Church in Ireland, Britain and Sri Lanka in a variety of roles including church minister, principal of Cliff College and Director of Global Relations.

He is currently Superintendent of the North Western Methodist district in Ireland.

Alice Wiseman has been Director of Public Health in Gateshead since May 2016 and Newcastle since April 2024, and registered with the UK Public Health Register since December 2009.

Alice is passionate about improving health and well-being with a particular focus on tackling the unacceptable inequalities faced by some communities.

Alice has a contract with the Clinical Research Network for half a day a week. Research priorities in Gateshead have focussed on opportunities to gain a better understanding of the lived experience of, and impact of Government policy on, people in some of the most disadvantaged communities.

Alice has recently been elected to the Board of ADPH and is also one of the DPH leads for addiction and inequality.

Professor Julia Sinclair is a leading expert in addiction psychiatry at the University of Southampton and an Honorary Consultant in Alcohol Liaison within the NHS. She is committed to improving outcomes for individuals with alcohol use disorders (AUD) and co-morbid physical and mental health conditions through research, teaching, clinical practice, and policy.

A graduate of St George’s Hospital Medical School, London (1994), Professor Sinclair trained in psychiatry in the Wessex region and at Oxford. She completed an MSc in Health Services Research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2004) and a DPhil at Christ Church, Oxford (2006).

Her research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of alcohol-related harm and developing effective prevention and treatment strategies. She also has roles in undergraduate education and is committed to ensuring that addiction clinical skills are embedded in the GMC curriculum and post graduate training.

Jonathan Shepherd CBE FMedSci is professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, founder of the Violence Research Group, and co-founder of the Crime and Security Research Institute at Cardiff University.

His research on clinical decisions, community violence and alcohol harms have had substantial impact on practice, policy and legislation. Prompted by his discoveries, he led the development of a prototype Community Safety Partnership which was used as a model in the Crime and Disorder Act which mandated the creation of such partnerships across Great Britain.

He initiated and developed the pioneering Universities’ Police Science Institute in Wales, and the information sharing “Cardiff Model” for violence prevention which was adopted by the WHO in 2005 and has been implemented across the UK and in cites in the United States, Australia and other countries. He also developed a comprehensive care pathway for people harmed by violence and led the development of new standards published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine and the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

His proposal for an independent professional body for policing, was taken up by the UK government and the new College of Policing was launched in 2013, underpinned by primary legislation. He was instrumental in the formation of the national Probation Institute in 2014. 

His surveys, laboratory work and field experiments on glass injury resulted in a switch to toughened glassware and polycarbonate alternatives in the UK licensed trade. His research and advocacy prompted the historic first National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) technology appraisal and guidance in 2000.

He won the 2008 Stockholm Criminology Prize (the first UK recipient of what The Times described as “the equivalent of a Nobel prize”) and his research group won Cardiff University a 2009 Queen’s Prize. 

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, reflecting his contributions to alcohol harm reduction and traumatic stress services; of the College of Emergency Medicine; and of the Faculty of Public Health at the Royal College of Physicians. He has served as council member and trustee of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which awarded him an honorary FRCS in 2012, and as vice chair of the national charity Victim Support. 

He contributed to the Domestic Violence (Wales) Bill and spoke for the NHS at the 2012 launch of the white paper. He initiated the professions summit series including the 2013 summit on evidence informed practice chaired by Lord O’Donnell. He initiated and drafted the Evidence Declaration signed by 27 professional bodies at the Royal Society in 2017 and also initiated the new Bazalgette Professorship for research translation in public health, first awarded in 2019.

He is a member of the Home Office Science Advisory Council and the What Works Council at the UK Cabinet Office.

Dr Phil Hadfield is director of www.philhadfield.co.uk, an independent research consultancy based in Leeds, UK. Phil’s work addresses problem-solving and cost vs benefit analysis for clients in community safety, public health, urban cultural planning, place management, policing and regulatory matters, with special reference to evening and night-time economies (ENTEs).

Phil has a background in academia and Research Council / NGO-funded projects. He currently holds advisory board / steering group roles at the University of Leeds, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and for the City of Bordeaux. He is also on the International Editorial Board of the journal Contemporary Drug Problems.

Phil has advised many UK local authorities, notably the City of Westminster, Camden, Hackney, Liverpool, and the City of London on their licensing policies, together with the City of Sydney, ‘Open Sydney’ Programme and has worked on three EC-funded Pan-European Research Programmes.

He is the author and co-author of some of the leading books and research articles on the ENTE, including: Bar Wars: Contesting the Night in Contemporary British Cities and Nightlife and Crime: Social Order and Governance in International Perspective, both published by Oxford University Press. Phil drinks too much coffee, drinks alcohol in moderation and tries to keep in reasonable shape.

Dr Sadie Boniface is a Principal Research Fellow at UCL and the Research Lead at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change.

She is an interdisciplinary mixed-methods behavioural researcher and has worked in public health and applied health research since 2009. Sadie’s research focuses on understanding patterns in health behaviours and health harms, and developing and appraising interventions and policies.

Sadie worked at the Institute of Alcohol Studies from 2019-24 as Head of Research. Highlights in her time at IAS included securing an NIHR Policy Research Programme grant in 2021 and setting up the IAS Small Grants Scheme in 2020. She is serving as Chair of the IAS Small Grants Scheme from 2026-29.

John Holmes is a Professor of Alcohol Policy at the University of Sheffield, Director of the Sheffield Addictions Research Group and co-Director of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Addictions. He completed degrees in Social Policy at the University of York and has worked at the Sheffield Centre for Health and Related Research (SCHARR) since 2010.

His research underpinned the introduction of minimum unit pricing in Scotland and the development of new low-risk drinking guidelines in the UK and Australia. More recent work focuses on the international decline in youth drinking, analyses of trends in drinking practices, and the public health impact of alcohol-free and low-alcohol drinks and reforms to alcohol duties. He is a member of the UK Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) Alcohol Advisory Group and a Senior Editor for the journal Addiction.

A graduate in Modern History from Oxford University, Crispin Acton joined the Department of Health (and Social Security, as it was then named) in 1976, retiring in 2017, adopting a specialist interest in alcohol policy over the years.

During his time working on alcohol policy, Crispin became involved in commissioning work on minimum unit pricing and taxation from Sheffield University’s School of Health & Related Research in 2007-08, worked on aspects of the Public Health Responsibility Deal and alcohol, notably labelling, and headed the Department of Health (DH) team which contributed to work on the Government’s Alcohol Strategy in 2012, as well as the proposals on minimum unit pricing in England developed between 2012 and 2013.

Crispin has also worked with the Scottish Government as part of the UK Government effort to help defend its legislation on alcohol minimum unit pricing in litigation brought by the Scotch whisky industry, working with legal advisers.

Most recently, he provided much of the DH secretariat work for the development of the UK Chief Medical Officers’ new alcohol guidelines, issued in January 2016, working closely with two expert groups and the chief medical officer for England.

Crispin studied for a MSc in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine from 2017, graduating in 2019.

Colin Angus is a Professor of Alcohol Policy, health economist and senior health economic modeller in the Sheffield Addictions Research Group (SARG) at the University of Sheffield. His work focuses on the development and application of complex behavioural and epidemiological models to explore the effects of alcohol policies and how these differ across the population.

He has worked across many areas of alcohol policy, including Minimum Unit Pricing, alcohol taxation, alcohol availability and licensing, and brief interventions. Alongside colleagues from SARG, his work on Minimum Unit Pricing played a key role in the development and implementation of the policy in Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland as well as informing debates about alcohol pricing across the UK and internationally.

Throughout his work, Colin’s research retains a strong focus on health inequalities – understanding the impact that alcohol plays in driving unequal health outcomes for more deprived groups and the potential for alcohol policies to reduce (or exacerbate) this gap.