Robert L. Balster PhD

Dr. Balster was the Founding Coordinator for the VCU site for the U.S. State Department Humphrey Fellowship Program in Substance Abuse Prevention, Treatment and Policy, and continues to work on that program. He is also a co-founder and co-director of the International Programme in Addiction Studies, an online master’s degree program. From 2006-2015 he also co-directed the Virginia Youth Tobacco Project, a statewide coalition of tobacco scientists supported by funds from the Master Settlement Agreement. From 1997-2013.

Dr. Balster was the Director of the VCU Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies and from 2011-2012, he was selected as a Jefferson Science Fellow with the Global Health Bureau at the US Agency for International Development and served until 2015 as a Science Advisor for the Office of Health, Infectious Diseases and Nutrition at USAID. He is a Past‑President of the CPDD and a former member of the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence and the FDA Drug Abuse Advisory Committee. From 1998 to 2010 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence. In 2014 he was Chair of the WHO Guideline Development Group on the Management of Opioid Dependence.