Dr Tina Lam is a Senior Research Fellow at the Monash Addiction Research Centre (MARC). She specialises in conducting policy and practice relevant alcohol and opioid-related research.

Opioid research Dr Lam has led includes the largest international study on the effect of type of opioid prescribed after surgery, the first population-level study which found a resurgence of Australian heroin harms around 2014, the largest international analysis of Emergency Department data to compare nine of the most commonly prescribed pharmaceutical-opioids in Australia, and the largest study to monitor for unintentional fentanyl consumption in Australia.

Dr Lam’s influential alcohol-research program on risky drinking Australian adolescents who are underrepresented in mainstream surveys but overrepresented in harms, has been recognised through citation of in the Commonwealth’s National Alcohol Strategy 2019-2028. Dr Lam led this alcohol program, and together with collaborators from research centres from all jurisdictions of Australia published 10 peer-reviewed papers on topics such as alcohol’s harms to others, insomnia amongst risky drinkers, alcohol advertising, pre-drinking and policy-support.

Dr Lam is a member of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s Technical Advisory Group for the National Drug Household Survey (Australia’s largest, most representative, and longest running drug survey). Dr Lam is also a Deputy Editor for the Drug and Alcohol Review journal, a technical report writer for the World Health Organisation’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence, and an Adjunct Research Fellow at the National Drug Research Institute. Dr Lam has won various awards such as the 2021 Monash University Early Career Researchers Publication Prize for Public Health Research, the 2019 Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol & Other Drugs Award oral presentation of a poster, 2018 Top five media commentators for the Faculty of Health Sciences (where in a 12 month period, her research was covered in 113 stories reaching a cumulative audience of 2.7 million and had an advertising space rate of $397k), and the 2013 Winner of McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth. Her project team has been listed as a finalist for the 2022 Victorian Health Promotion Outstanding Health Promotion Award.

To date, Dr Lam has been awarded >$3M to conduct addiction research, including $1M as primary investigator. Dr Lam joined Monash in 2018, and from 2019-2022 published 28 papers including five in the discipline's most prestigious journal ‘Addiction’, three as lead author. Dr Lam also has a comprehensive catalogue of outputs not traditionally captured, such as 24 technical reports commissioned by bodies such as the World Health Organisation, the Commonwealth Department of Health, the Mental Health Commission, and the Cancer Council; and has produced over 15 bulletins designed specifically for policy-makers.