Leanne Hides

Professor Leanne Hides is the Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence on Meaningful Outcomes in Substance Use Treatment and the Deputy Director of the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR)

Professor Hides is a clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience working on the interface of alcohol and other drug (AOD) clinical research and practice. Her translational research program co-designs, trials and implements innovative AOD treatments into clinical practice. She has been a chief investigator on over 40 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on substance use and mental health treatment (23 as lead CI including 11 NHMRC-funded RCTs). She also develops web and mobile-phone based programs (16 RCTs). Most of this research has been conducted with industry partners (e.g., Lives Lived Well, Qld Health).

Hides has been in research only positions since 2010, funded by prestigious fellowships including an NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship (2017-21), ARC Future Fellowship (2012-16) and a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellowship (Queensland University of Technology, 2010-13). Her research has been supported by $46m in grants ($37 nationally competitive) including 15 NHMRC ($14.5m; 3 as CIA including a Centre for Research Excellence), 3 MRFF ($7m) and 2 ARC ($1m) grants. Professor Hides has 248 career publications, including 243 journal articles with over 10,000 citations.

Prof Hides' current research interests include:

• Developing and testing new models for understanding youth substance use and comorbidity
• Improving the treatment of youth substance use and comorbidity by:
  • Integrating more strengths-based approaches
  • Identifying and enhancing mechanisms of change
  • Combining psychological and pharmacological treatments,
  • Integrating mobile phone and web-based interventions
• Understanding the relationship between youth wellbeing and mental disorders
• Development of mobile phone and web-based interventions targeting the mental health and wellbeing of young people
  • Ray’s night out: mobile app targeting risky alcohol use
  • music eScape: mobile app using music to improve affect regulation
  • Breakup Shakeup: mobile app for coping with relationship breakups
  • Keep it Real: web-based program targeting psychotic-like experiences in substance users
  • Routine outcome monitoring (ROM) plus feedback in SMART Recovery Australia: a feasibility study examining SMART ROM (led by A/Prof Kelly, UoW).
• Training, supervision, and dissemination of evidence-based practice

Nationally Competitive Funding

• NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence (led by Prof Hides, UQ): Meaningful Outcomes in Substance use Treatment. See https://mo-cre.centre.uq.edu.au/
• Commonwealth Department of Health (Connor & Hides), National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR) National Addiction Centre
• MRFF Health and Healthy Lifestyles (led by Prof Bonevski, Flinders University): "Escape the vape" Designing health communications for prevention of e-cigarette use in young people
• MRFF Health and Healthy Lifestyles (led by Prof Newton, Matilda Centre Uni Syd): A new scalable e-health appraoch to prevent e-cigarette use amongh adolescents: The OurFutures Vaping Program
• NHMRC Ideas Grant (led by Prof Johnson): Understanding and Treating Videogame Addiction in Young People
• Alcohol and Drug Foundation Research Grant (led by Prof Kelly): Building peer and provider capacity to effectively deliver SMART Family & friends meetings: A two stage mixed- methods evaluation.
• MRFF Million Minds (led by Prof March, USQ): Translating evidence-based interventions into population-level digital models of care for child & adolescent mental health
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Hides): Brief interventions to prevent future alcohol-related harm in young people presenting to emergency departments.
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Hides: Randomised controlled trial of a telephone-delivered social well-being and engaged living (SWEL) intervention for disengaged at-risk youth
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Teesson, University of Sydney)- Internet-based universal prevention for anxiety, depression and substance use in young Australians
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Teesson, University of Sydney)- Healthy, wealthy and wise: The long-term effectiveness of an online universal program to prevent substance use and mental health problems among Australian youth
• Paul Ramsay Foundation (led by Prof Teesson, University of Sydney): The Healthy Lifestyles program: An innovative online primary and secondary prevention intervention
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Kavanagh, QUT) - Trial of a new low-cost treatment to support self-management of Alcohol Use Disorder: Functional Imagery Training
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Toombs, University of QLD) - Indigenous Network Suicide Intervention Skills Training (INSIST): Can a community designed and delivered framework reduce suicide/self-harm in Indigenous youth?
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Collins, University of Newcastle) Efficacy and cost-effectiveness of varying levels of technology-delivered personalised feedback on dietary patterns in motivating young Australian adults to improve diet quality and eating habits: The Advice, Ideas and Motivation for My Eating study
• NHMRC Project (led by Prof Cotton, University of Melbourne) - Rates, patterns and predictors of long-term outcome in a treated first-episode psychosis cohort