Brief report on the visit by Dr Rob Calder, CEO of the Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA)

Context

Over the past six years, Substance Use Research Group (SURG) in Health Sciences has been building collaborations with other substance use researchers from other disciplines across the University of Dundee (UoD). In November 2025, we facilitated a meeting with a UoD-wide group to determine if there was an appetite for collaboration, and how we can meaningfully achieve this. Researchers from Health Sciences, Medicine, Dentistry, Social Work, Psychology, Leverhulme, the Health Informatics Centre, Business and Law attended this meeting. There was consensus that there was an important need to work more collaboratively, and that there needs to be a vision to help steer how we achieve this collaborative working. In January 2026, we met again and agreed to seek out a formal research partnership with NHS Tayside and other local partners, to identify key research priorities and solutions relating to reducing harms caused by substance use across Tayside. 

The SSA visit

On Wednesday 25 March 2026, SURG hosted a visit by Dr Rob Calder, CEO of the Society for the Study of Addiction (SSA). The SSA has been recently provided with increased funding from the UK Government to address its Addiction Healthcare Goals, and Rob is keen to widely disseminate information about the different funding schemes. Rob was already keen to visit Dundee to meet with SURG, as he was familiar with the group’s activities through Dr Paul Toner, the lead of SURG and a former SSA fellow.

Members of the UoD wide group attended a two-hour meeting in the morning, where we presented our research interests and projects. Following this, Rob presented about the SSA and its funding schemes. These include PhD studentships, fellowships and post-doctoral support. This was beneficial for the group as we made enquiries about funding that may be potentially applicable to us. Rob also met individually with researchers from Health Sciences and Dentistry later in the afternoon who were unable to make the group meeting. These researchers reported that these meetings were very informative. Rob was grateful for the opportunity to meet us and get to learn about our valuable and impactful research, and posted about his visit on LinkedIn. 

We wish to thank the Wellcome Institutional Funding for Research Culture for supporting this visit by providing refreshments. Given that Rob travelled from London for this visit, and that he met with researchers throughout the day, having some refreshments was appreciated.

Dr. Andrea Mohan on behalf of SURG