Louise Mewton

Associate Professor Louise Mewton is a public health researcher and academic at the University of Sydney, where she serves as Program Lead in Lifespan and Brain Health Research at the Matilda Centre. Her work focuses on the epidemiology, assessment, prevention, and treatment of alcohol use and related disorders across the lifespan, with particular emphasis on understanding and reducing the cognitive impacts of alcohol exposure during gestation, adolescence, and older adulthood.

Dr. Mewton completed her PhD in 2012 at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW, where her research focused on the epidemiology and diagnosis of alcohol use disorders in youth. Following this, she served as Statistical Advisor and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety and Depression at St Vincent's Hospital, UNSW (2012-2014), investigating online treatments for anxiety and depression in primary healthcare settings. In 2014, she received an Australian Rotary Health Postdoctoral Fellowship to study online cognitive training for preventing mental illness and risky alcohol use in youth. She was appointed as a UNSW Scientia Lecturer in 2018, continuing her research on alcohol use disorders across the lifespan.

Her research program spans multiple domains within public health and addiction science, with a strong emphasis on longitudinal studies and causal inference methods. She has made significant contributions to understanding the relationship between alcohol consumption and cognitive decline, particularly in older adults, while also examining the developmental impacts of alcohol exposure during adolescence and gestation. Her work frequently employs large-scale datasets and international collaborations to address questions of global relevance in substance use and mental health.

An analysis of her recent publications reveals a consistent focus on the intersection of alcohol use, mental health, and cognitive outcomes across the lifespan. Her work demonstrates methodological sophistication, particularly in causal inference approaches for observational data, and spans epidemiological studies, clinical trials, and psychometric research. She has made important contributions to understanding the relationship between alcohol consumption and dementia risk, as well as the complex interplay between substance use disorders and mental health conditions.

• Early career award from Australasian Professional Society for Alcohol and Drugs (2016)
• Early career award from College of Problems on Drug Dependence (United States, 2012)
• Young Tall Poppy Award from Australian Institute of Policy and Science (2017)
• Society for Mental Health Research's Early Career Researcher Award (2017)

Dr. Mewton has secured substantial research funding, with $15 million in fellowship and project funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Rotary Health, Dementia Centre for Research Collaboration, Dementia Australia, and the National Institutes of Health (US). She currently leads multiple significant research initiatives, including a large-scale randomized controlled trial investigating the effectiveness of an online alcohol intervention for reducing alcohol use and cognitive decline in older adults. She also leads studies using COSMIC cohort data to examine alcohol-dementia relationships cross-nationally and collaborates with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to improve coverage of low-to-middle income countries in Global Burden of Disease estimates for dementia.

Her research is conducted through collaborations with the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing and the COSMIC consortium, leveraging international datasets to address critical questions in brain health and aging. These collaborations enable her to address research questions with sufficient statistical power and cross-cultural validity, particularly in the areas of alcohol use, cognitive decline, and dementia risk.