Dr Flavio Pechansky
Co-Chair
Flavio Pechansky is a Full Professor of Psychiatry, Founder and former Director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Research affiliated with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and of the Collaborating Center on Alcohol and Drugs of the Hospital de Clinicas of Porto Alegre (HCPA), a large teaching hospital associated with that same university.
Dr. Pechansky earned his speciality in Psychiatry, his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Medicine with honours at UFRGS and was trained as a NIDA-funded Hubert H. Humphrey fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, in the Department of Mental Hygiene.
He founded and chaired the Addiction Psychiatry Services at HCPA for 8 years, and for the same period, was the Chair of the Professional Master’s Program in Mental Health and Addictive Disorders at HCPA. He has worked as an addiction psychiatrist for 39 years and has trained hundreds of professionals - including undergraduate, speciality and postgraduate medicine students, psychology, odontology, biomedicine, and psychiatry.
Dr. Pechansky is with the Department of Psychiatry at UFRGS since 1995, was an Associate Visiting Scientist at the University of Kentucky, the University of Delaware, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
He was also a member of the Impairment in Transportation Committee of the Transportation Research Board, and Member-at-Large of the Board of the International Council on Alcohol, Drugs and Traffic Safety – ICADTS.
He has an extensive career in training, consultancy and writing in the field, with more than 200 publications, including books, book chapters, editorials, and original papers in Brazilian and international scientific journals in the areas of epidemiology and treatment of alcoholism and drug abuse, adolescent drug and alcohol experimentation, risk behaviours for the transmission of HIV among drug users, and drunk/drugged driving.
He has served and is currently a consultant for the Brazilian government and has been a chair/member of more than ten scientific committees of Brazilian and international institutions, as well as editor and member of editorial boards of Brazilian and international scientific journals – among them the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry and Addiction – of which he was assistant regional editor for 10 years.
Currently, Dr. Pechansky is a member of the Consulting Group of the National Council on Drug Policies in Brazil, President of ICADTS, and a member of the World Health Organization Technical Advisory Group on Alcohol and Drug Epidemiology, as well as local and Brazilian scientific associations affiliated with psychiatry and drug addiction treatment and research. He has been awarded several prizes for papers published and presented throughout his career and has an Award of Excellence in International Leadership by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.