Dr. Frederick Altice and his coauthors have won the 2017 European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) scientific award.
The award was given for a paper titled “The perfect storm: incarceration and the high-risk environment perpetuating transmission of HIV, hepatitis C virus, and tuberculosis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.” Altice has been invited to present the article and receive the award at the Lisbon Addictions conference, hosted by the EMCDDA, on Oct. 25 in Lisbon, Portugal.
The EMCDDA scientific award “celebrates scientific writing and distinguishes high-quality research in the field of illicit drugs.” Chair of the EMCDDA Scientific Committee, Dr. Anne Line Breteville-Jensen said of the award’s significance: “New scientific developments can broaden the EMCDDA’s understanding of the drugs phenomenon, helping it to innovate and keep pace with new challenges and threats. The EMCDDA scientific award allows us to showcase major advancements in the field of drugs and addictions and maintain an ongoing dialogue with the research and scientific community across the EU.”
Altice is a clinician and clinical epidemiologist, an implementation science researcher, and a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and public health at Yale. His research, which led to the publication of this paper, focuses on the interface between infectious diseases, substance use disorders, and criminal justice with an eye on global health impacts. Currently, he has internationally funded projects operating at research sites in Malaysia, Ukraine, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Peru. Funding for the current research was provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Altice also is leading a number of projects based in the American criminal justice system — including transitional programs addressing infectious diseases, medication-assisted therapies for treating alcohol and opioid use disorders, mental illness and social instability — which focus on the development and evaluation of biomedical and behavioral interventions to improve treatment outcomes for incarcerated and recently released populations.