Jesper Andreasson

PhD
jesper.andreasson@lnu.se

Jesper Andreasson has a PhD in Sociology and is associate professor in sport science at the Department of sport science, Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has extensive experience of working with ethnographic fieldwork and different internet methods. His research can mainly be positioned within gender and body studies and cultural sociology, and he has written extensively about gym and fitness culture and different aspects of doping within this cultural context.

Recent books are Extreme Sports, Extreme Bodies. Gender, Health and bodies in motion (2019) and Fitness Doping. Trajectories, Gender, Bodies and Health (both co-authored with Thomas Johansson and published with Palgrave Macmillan). Andreasson oversees a 120-credit graduate masters programme in sport science and teaches at the graduate and postgraduate levels, mainly in the areas of research methods and social theory.

Astrid Bjornebekk
askrbj@ous-hf.no

I am a senior researcher at the Section for Clinical Substance Use and Addiction Research, Oslo University Hospital, and head of the The Anabolic Androgenic Steroid Research Group. My research interest concerns factors influencing brain development or induce changes in the adult brain, and how brain structure relates to behaviour, cognition, and mental health. I have previously worked with basic research investigating mechanism at a molecular level in animal models in relation to depressive illness and its treatment but have in recent years utilized advanced MRI neuroimaging approaches to study brain-behaviour links in humans. In my current research we investigate long-term consequences of anabolic steroid use on brain structure, behaviour and cognition with neuroimaging, mental health screening and comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. We have carried out the first large-scale neuroimaging investigating of AAS users, suggesting that long-term AAS use is associated with thinner cerebral cortex and cognitive impairments. Now we have followed this sample longitudinally with more comprehensive medical assessments. A particular focus of our research group relates to the development of AAS dependence, where we try to uncover mechanisms to why some seem to be more vulnerable than others to the effects of AAS and the development of AAS dependence

Dr Rebekah Brennan

rebekah.brennan@ucc.ie

Dr. Rebekah Brennan has twelve years’ experience as a qualitative researcher in the field of drug sociology. She is widely published in performance & image enhancing drugs, psychoactive drugs, new drug trends and upholds a harm reductionist position. She is a former Irish Research Council awardee and a Research Associate at ISS21 at University College Cork. She also lectures in substance use, social justice and intervention skills in drug work.

Razieh Chegeni
Razieh.Chegeni@uib.no

I am born in 17.08.1991 in Iran. I received my BSc in chemical engineering in 2014 from Azad University of Tehran North, my MSc in clinical psychology in 2016 from Alzahra University, and currently, working as a research fellow at University of Bergen, I am toward the end of my PhD project which is on Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid use and aggression. My interests reside broadly in addiction area (including AAS misuse and dependence and gambling addiction), personality psychology (mainly the Dark Triad), body image and drive for muscularity, and evolutionary psychology (including mate preferences, mate retention behaviors, intrasexual rivalry, and women’s long-term strategies).

The main focus of my PhD project is to examine the longitudinal correlates of AAS use and intent in adolescence and emerging adulthood, merging and synthesizing the results from the available human randomized controlled trials on the association between AAS use and aggression in a systematic review and meta-analysis, and finally, examining subgroups of AAS use based on users’ psychological profile (i.e., aggression, and psychological distress) and assessing whether these subgroups are invariant in terms of gender differences.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Razieh_Chegeni

Ask Vest Christiansen

Aarhus University, Denmark
avc@ph.au.dk

Ask Vest Christiansen is Associate Professor of Sport Science in the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University in Denmark. He has served for eight years as the Co-Director of the International Network of Doping Research (INDR). Dr Christiansen’s research has followed two main branches: doping in elite sport and recreational athletes’ use of drugs in gyms, fitness and strength training environments. His extensive research on use of AAS in gyms has recently been published by Routledge in: Gym Culture, Identity and Performance-Enhancing Drugs, Tracing a Typology of Steroid Use.

Ingrid Amalia Havnes,

MD, PhD
i.a.havnes@ous-research.no

Ingrid Amalia Havnes, MD, PhD, is a specialist in psychiatry and family medicine. Havnes is engaged as a researcher in the Steroid Project, National Advisory Unit on Substance Use Disorder (SUD) treatment, Division of Mental Health and Addiction at Oslo University Hospital in Norway and is a member of the Anabolic-Androgenic Steroid (AAS) Research Group. She has worked 20 years in mental health and SUD treatment including as senior consultant providing treatment for AAS-dependent men in outpatient SUD treatment and supervision of clinicians nationwide about providing biopsychosocial health service to the patient group.

Havnes is engaged in qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research projects focusing on health risks, barriers and facilitators to seeking treatment among users of anabolic-androgenic steroids. She has published papers exploring AAS use among women, patients in SUD treatment and prisoners in a national study. She is currently leading a research project exploring a) whether health risks are reduced among men who cease AAS use, and b) if off-label use of clomiphene citrate will reduce withdrawal symptoms upon cessation. The study will also include a qualitative component exploring experiences of psychosocial interventions. Havnes’ previous research projects focused on crime and substance use, diversion of methadone/buprenorphine, methadone-related overdose, user involvement and evaluation of treatment programs for patients with cooccurring mental health and SUDs.

Human Enhancement Drugs Network (HEDN)

Malene Radmer Johannisson

mrj@antidoping.dk

About me and my work: Master of Arts in Communications. Since 2008 I have worked in the Danish National Anti-Doping Organisation (NADO) preventing use of doping outside sports, mainly in fitness centres. My main focus has been building co-operations with partners in the fitness industry and other public health organisations, educate professionals, create and facilitate network, develop preventive campaigns and raise political issues within the doping and public health debate. Internationally, I have been a part of Council of Europe’s T-DO advisory Group on Education since 2016 and shared the Danish experiences and learnings from working with anti-doping in fitness centres on several occasions. I am currently co-chairing a Technical Working Group (TWG) set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in order to facilitate the development of occupational standards, competency frameworks and training program content on an international level.

Marie Lindvik Jorstad
lindvm@ous-hf.no

Bengt Kayser

bengt.kayser@unil.ch

Bengt Kayser studied medicine (MD) at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and then engaged in an academic career in the field of exercise physiology with a special interest in hypoxia. After obtaining his first PhD in exercise physiology at the Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, he worked at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, before joining the University of Geneva in Switzerland. After preparing the merger of the Lausanne and Geneva institutes of sport and movement sciences he is since 2013 at the University of Lausanne where he directs the Institute of Sport Sciences. His research interests concern the factors limiting endurance exercise performance, altitude medicine and physiology, respiratory mechanics and gas exchange during exercise, and the relationship between physical activity, energy balance and (public) health in different settings. He also has a keen interest in the ethics of doping and anti-doping, human enhancement, and substance use in general. He has published extensively in this field contributing a critical voice to the anti-doping debate, putting current anti-doping policy in a wider societal perspective beyond elite sport only. In May 2018 he defended a second PhD thesis on this topic at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.

William Llewellyn
http://williamllewellyn.com/about/

William Llewellyn is author of the ANABOLICS Reference Guide. More than 20 years since its first publication, this book is presently in its 11th edition, and has established itself as the bestselling and most widely distributed guide on the subject of anabolic steroids. As both a researcher and former user, William’s work is a combination of scientific analysis and real world application. He is an avid supporter of the harm reduction community, where he seeks to educate others so they can make informed decisions. William has contributed to various other books, movies, and shows over the years, including the documentary film Bigger Stronger Faster, and the NY Times Bestseller 4-Hour Body. He has also been featured on the cover of ESPN Magazine and The Washington Post.

Lena Lundholm
lena.lundholm@ki.se

Verner Møller

vm@ph.au.dk

Verner Møller is Professor of Sport and Body Culture at Aarhus University, Department of Public Health where he is heading the sport and body culture research unit. His research focuses on elite sport and body cultural extremes. He is the founder of the International Network of Doping Research, and he has edited and authored a number of books on doping including: Elite Sport, Doping and Public Health 2009; The Ethics of Doping and Anti-Doping – Redeeming the Soul of Sport (2010), The Scapegoat – About the Expulsion of Michael Rasmussen from the Tour de France 2007 People’s Press, Doping and Anti-Doping Policy in Sport: Ethical, Legal and Social Perspectives (2011) Routledge Handbook of Sport and Drugs (2015) and The Anti-Doping Crisis in Sport – Causes, consequences, solutions (2018).

Marie Overbye

Ph.D.
marie.overbye@stir.ac.uk

Marie Overbye, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Sport, University of Stirling, UK. She completed her PhD at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark (2013) and subsequently she worked as a postdoc at University of Southern Denmark. Her research areas so far mainly relates to sporting lives and working conditions, drugs in sport, doping and anti-doping policy, prevention strategies in sport and society.
See (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2017.12.019) for an analysis and discussion of how and why drug related harms, harm reduction, and best prevention models in sport differ from other contexts, for example, AAS use in a none-sport setting.

Ståle Pallesen
Staale.Pallesen@uib.no

Professor, PhD
University of Bergen
Department of Psychosocial Science
Christiesgt.12, 5015 Bergen
Phone: +47 55 58 88 42
Mobile: +47 926 32 099
www.spillforsk.no
www.uib.no/en/rg/fgav
www.BeSCN.no

Harrison Pope

Harvard University, USA
hpope@mclean.harvard.edu

Dr. Harrison G. Pope, Jr. is a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA and Chief of the Biological Psychiatry Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, USA. Dr. Pope has authored more than 340 peer-reviewed papers on a wide range of topics in psychiatry, including work on psychotic disorders, major mood disorders, eating disorders, and substance abuse. In 2003, Dr. Pope was named by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the world’s most widely cited psychiatrists/psychologists and separately as one of the most world’s most widely cited neuroscientists.

Starting in the 1990s, Dr. Pope began to focus increasingly on substance use disorders, with particular interest on the use of anabolic-androgenic steroids. He has now published more than 40 papers on anabolic steroid use and related topics. Dr. Pope has presented the findings of this research at scientific meetings and conferences in North America, Europe, and Asia and has appeared in numerous documentary films on the subject. Dr. Pope has also testified about anabolic-androgenic steroid use before the United States Congress and other United States federal bodies. Currently, he is conducting a five-year study exploring the potential neurotoxicity of long-term anabolic-androgenic steroid use.

Willem de Ronde
w.de.ronde@spaarnegasthuis.nl

Dr Willem de Ronde, MD, PhD is internist-endocrinologist at the department of internal medicine of the Spaarne Gasthuis in Haarlem, the Netherlands. He is an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of male hypogonadism. He is head of the internal medicine residency program, founder of the Dutch Anabolic Steroid Center of Expertise and principle investigator of the HAARLEM study. He is (co) author of more than 50 peer reviewed manuscripts.

Dominic Sagoe

Department of Psychosocial Science, University of Bergen, Norway.
Dominic.Sagoe@uib.no

Dominic Sagoe is an associate professor at the Department of Psychosocial Science and leader of the Human Enhancement and Body Image Lab (HEBI Lab) at the University of Bergen. He obtained a PhD in psychology from the University of Bergen in 2015. Dominic’s research specialization is in epidemiological and psychosocial aspects of human enhancement drug (HED) use particularly anabolic-androgenic steroid use, and body image. He has published several articles in his speciality, and has collaborated with many academics, researchers, policymakers, and health professionals around the world.

Dr Mair Underwood

m.underwood@uq.edu.au

Dr Mair Underwood is an anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Queensland. She specializes in human bodies and particularly their modification. Her current interest is in bodybuilding and the use of image and performance enhancing drugs. She has been working in online bodybuilding communities for the last 5 years, and is proud to be a spokesperson for these communities. Her aim is to redress the neglect of the bodybuilder perspective in academic debates about their lives.

Katinka van de Ven
K.vandeVen@une.edu.au

Dr Katinka van de Ven is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Rural Criminology, University of New England and a Visiting Fellow as part of the Drug Policy Modelling Program (DPMP), Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC), UNSW. Katinka specializes in the use and supply of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), which includes projects surrounding anabolic-androgenic steroids and drugs policy, harm minimization, and improving health services for people who use enhancement drugs. She also conducts research in relation to alcohol and other drug (AOD) treatment services systems more broadly, amongst others around funding mechanisms, workforce characteristics, client outcomes and rurality. Katinka is the Founder and Director of the Human Enhancement Drugs Network (HEDN), is the Editor-in-Chief of Performance Enhancement & Health, has co-edited the Routledge published book Human Enhancement Drugs, and (co-)authored a numbers of peer-reviewed papers within the enhancement field.

Anders Schmidt Vinther
asv@ph.au.dk

Anders Schmidt Vinther is currently PhD student in the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University. His research project Drug Use and Prevention in Gymsaims to understand how young men’s use of anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) in gyms and fitness centres can be prevented, and to what degree it’s possible. He explores this through surveying and interviewing international researchers and practitioners with expertise in the field as well as through qualitative interviews with gym staff and young males training in gyms. His previous research focused on current AAS users’ motivation and experiences. He has also been in charge of a Government funded community intervention to prevent the use of doping substances and he has several years of experience with prevention of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs. With many years of engagement in bodybuilding and power lifting communities, he has an academic as well as a personal interest in the topic of human enhancement.

Mayyada Wazaify

Ph.D.
School of Pharmacy, The University of Jordan, Amman- 11942-Jordan
m.wazaify@ju.edu.jo

A Professor of Pharmacy Practice at School of Pharmacy, The University of Jordan (UJ). She has 20 years of experience in the area of prescription and OTC drug abuse and misuse, mainly the enforcement of the role of the pharmacist in the prevention, identification and management of drug abuse and misuse. Previously an Assistant Dean for Student Affairs at School of Pharmacy at UJ (2009) and currently an Adjunct Professor in Social Pharmacy at University of Helsinki, Finland. She was also a Visiting Lecturer at University of Bath/UK (2012-2015). Prof. Wazaify obtained the Best Scientific Research Award by Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar in 2013 and the Distinguished Researcher Award at University of Jordan twice; in 2011 and 2012. She has consulted for Jordan Food and Drug Administration (JFDA) and Jordan Anti-narcotics Department since 2004 and served as an Advisor of the 41st  Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) of the World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva in 2018.

Dr Renee Zahnow

BA (Hons),  Ph.D Criminology
Lecturer in Criminology
r.zahnow@uq.edu.au

Dr Renee Zahnow is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland (UQ). Renee has expertise in spatial and longitudinal analyses and she has applied these skills to examine a range of social problems including crime, disorder, community social processes, resilience, substance use and community regulation. Renee’s research focuses on place-based patterns of crime and victimisation; she is particularly interested in understanding the link between the regularities of daily human mobility, social and behavioural norms and the propensity for crime and deviance.

Renee also has a particular interest in studying the illicit use of steroids and PIEDS to better understand patterns of use, user typologies and socio-cultural factors influencing aggregate trends. She has expert knowledge in areas of urban criminology, public policy, victimology and substance use. Her work is published in various journals, including Criminology; Journal of Quantitative Criminology; Environment and Behavior and Urban Studies.

Tjeerd de Zeeuw

Tjeerd de Zeeuw is a psychologist and health scientist working for the Dutch harm reduction organization Mainline and is a PhD candidate doing research in the field of behaviour change. Tjeerd has over 25 years of experience in strength sports and bodybuilding, as an athlete, trainer and nutritionist. His first-hand information and knowledge of the use of performance and image-enhancing drugs, coupled with a scientific background, enable him to promptly identify needs and developments in this field and translate them into evidence-based, yet pragmatic, interventions.