ICARA Summer Newsletter – 2026

Dear ICARA members and colleagues,

As summer gets underway, we’d like to share some exciting updates from across the ICARA community. Thank you for your continued support, collaboration, and commitment to strengthening alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive behaviours research around the world.

Thank You for Joining Our Researcher Tool Launch

A huge thank you to everyone who joined us in May for the launch of ICARA’s new Researcher Tool. We were delighted to introduce this new resource, designed to strengthen connections across our international research community.

The Researcher Tool allows researchers to create a professional profile, showcase their expertise, identify potential collaborators, and discover others working in similar areas of alcohol, tobacco, other drugs research. By building a searchable international network, the platform aims to make collaboration easier and increase opportunities for research partnerships.If you haven’t joined yet, we’d love to see you there! Simply visit the Researcher Tool page on our website to register, create your profile, and begin connecting with researchers from around the world.

Celebrating Our Royal Society of Edinburgh Grant

Our Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) funded project comes to a close next month, and we’d like to thank everyone who contributed to making it such a success.

Through this funding, ICARA delivered three international capacity-building workshops:

  • Workshop 1 (Online): Tips on Funding and Writing Alcohol Research Proposals – participants explored practical strategies for developing competitive funding applications, identifying funding opportunities, and strengthening proposal writing.
  • Workshop 2 (KBS Conference, Glasgow): focused on building successful international collaborations, developing impactful research, and sharing practical advice for early- and mid-career researchers.
  • Workshop 3 (GAPC, Rio de Janeiro): explored translating research into policy and practice, strengthening partnerships, and increasing the real-world impact of alcohol research across diverse settings.

If you couldn’t attend, or would like a refresher, the summary flyers from all three workshops are now available on the ICARA Resources page.

Welcome to Our New Board Members

Congratulations to our newly elected ICARA Board members! We are delighted to welcome new expertise and perspectives to help guide the future of our organisation.

Dr. Rachel Barry moves into the president role, while Dr. Andy Mohan is now Immediate Past President. Dr. Sreekanth Thekkumkara also now joins us in the VP role.There are still opportunities to become involved. We are continuing to recruit for several Board positions and warmly encourage members who are interested in shaping ICARA’s future to consider standing. Details of the available positions can be found here.

Call for Papers

For those of you working or with colleagues in the Global South (LMICs), we wanted to inform you about this exciting new BMC Global and Public Health special collection on  “Alcohol control and harm reduction in LMICs: evidence, policy, implementation and practice”. The deadline for submission to this Collection is 05 March 2027 and more information can be found here.

Thank You

Thank you for being part of the ICARA community. Whether you’ve attended our events, contributed to workshops, collaborated on research, or supported our mission in other ways, your engagement helps strengthen our global network.

We look forward to sharing more exciting developments in the coming months. Until then, we wish you a productive, enjoyable, and restful summer.

With best wishes,

The ICARA Team

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