Rate My Professor Louisa Degenhardt

Scientia Professor Louisa Degenhardt is UNSW Scientia Professor and NHMRC Senior Principal Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), Faculty of Medicine, UNSW. She was awarded her PhD in 2003, examining the comorbidity of drug use and mental disorders in the Australian population. She holds honorary Professorial appointments at the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, and University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation. Degenhardt conducts diverse epidemiological studies including analysis of large-scale community and clinical population surveys, data linkage studies focusing upon people with a history of drug dependence or chronic pain, and cohort studies of young people. From 2001 to 2008 she established and expanded national drug surveillance systems across Australia, including the National Illicit Drug Indicators Project and the Illicit Drug Reporting System. She rejoined the Drug Trends program at NDARC in 2018 as a chief investigator. She has published over 560 peer reviewed papers, 120 technical reports and monographs, three books and 45 book chapters. Her H-index in Scopus is 80, and 104 in Google Scholar. Degenhardt has led seminal research on the global burden of illicit drug dependence as part of the Global Burden of Disease study and serves on international expert groups including those for the United Nations and World Health Organization.

Her work includes examination of mortality related to opioid antagonist treatment, post marketing surveillance of new opioid agonist pharmacotherapies, indirect prevalence estimation studies of drug dependence and injecting drug use, and studies of drug overdose. She has received recognition including naming in the Research.com Best Female Scientists in the World 2022 Ranking and the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers 2022 list. Degenhardt continues to contribute to longitudinal cohorts, data linkage studies and international studies of the epidemiology of drug use and dependence.