Silvia Martins
Silvia S. Martins is a Professor of Epidemiology, the Director of Columbia’s Policies and Health Initiatives for Opioids and Other Substances (PHIOS) Interdisciplinary Group, and the founding Director of the Substance Use Epidemiology Unit in the Department of Epidemiology, Columbia University. She is also the co-director of the Substance Abuse Epidemiology Training program at Columbia University, which has been continuously funded by NIDA since 2012 and trains doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows. She is a psychiatrist and an epidemiologist. She completed her MD and PhD degrees at institutions in Brazil (UFPR and University of Sao Paulo, respectively), followed by post-doctoral training in Drug Dependence Epidemiology at the Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She has been continuously funded by NIH since 2006 as a Principal Investigator. She has co-authored >230 peer-reviewed epidemiological and substance use articles (>100 first or senior-authored), 90 of them led by her current or former mentees. Read more
Some of her research findings have identified a typology of prescription drug monitoring programs and its impact on prescription opioid and heroin overdoses, machine learning techniques to understand opioid policies associated with high-opioid prescribing, the effects of recreational cannabis laws in cannabis use in US adolescents and adults, and substance use and psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents in Brazil. Most recently, she has received NIH supplement funds to study the relationship between COVID-19 and opioid use disorder and overdoses in chronic pain patients in NY State Medicaid data and Columbia internal funding to investigate the relationship between state unemployment insurance safety net programs and drug use disorder and drug overdose outcomes. She received several awards for her research and mentoring, including one of 2022’s Columbia Calderone Health Equity Awards, the 2017 Columbia University MSPH Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring, the 2021 Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Sciences Stephanie Robert Mentoring Award and the 2021 National Hispanic Science Network Award for Excellence in Mentoring and the Tow Faculty Leadership Award. She was recently elected to serve on the Board of Directors of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.
