Immediate Past President

Matilda Hellman

Biography
Matilda Hellman, PhD, research leader, adjunct professor, is a researcher in social, sociohistorical and cultural understandings and articulations of addiction, lifestyles, health, deviance and social marginalization. Her research has focused especially on how political and popular discourse as well as governance practice and institutions embed views on questions such as drug use, alcohol policy, gambling, brain-based addiciton and how it effects individuals, groups and societies.
Hellman is the director of the research group University of Helsinki Centre for Research on Addiction, Control and Governance (CEACG). She is guest researcher at the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) and editor-in-chief for Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (NAD). Hellman serves as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Research in 2018. Within this appointment she is writing a monograph about how agency-based stratification materializes through addiction policies.
Hellman has held the lead in various international research projects since 2005, the latest of which is an ongoing ERA-NET-consortium regarding brain based addiction’s implications for policy and governance. She served as a senior lecturer in sociology atthe University of Tampere, 2015-2017. She is the member of editorial boards of Addiction Research & Theory and Research in Gender Studies.