Associate ProfessorMark Montebello

Clinical Associate Professor Mark Montebello is a Psychiatrist and Addiction Medicine Specialist with more than 25 years’ experience in drug and alcohol clinical care, health-service leadership, research, teaching, and workforce development. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and the Fellow of the Australasian Chapter of Addiction Medicine.

He has been the Head of the Specialty of Addiction Medicine at the University of Sydney since 2024. He convened and Chairs the University of Sydney, Specialty of Addiction Medicine Affiliates meeting connecting researchers, educators, and addiction specialists from all precincts.  He is the Addiction Medicine Lead for the Sydney Health Partners Mental Health Clinical Academic Group. He has had an affiliation with the University of Sydney since 2017, and previously was an Honorary Lecturer, and later Senior Lecturer, at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, 2003-2026.

Since 2017, Clinical Associate Professor Montebello has been the Clinical Director and Senior Staff Specialist for the Northern Sydney Local Health District Drug and Alcohol Service. This service delivers a broad range of contemporary, evidence-based treatments for people with substance use and related disorders. He is also an Admitting Medical Officer for the Royal North Shore Hospital Inpatient Drug and Alcohol Service, a busy fifteen bed ward that includes four beds for the NSW Involuntary Drug and Alcohol Treatment program. He has broad clinical experience in psychiatry and addiction medicine from working in a range of public and private services including two rural settings. His clinical leadership and expertise are well recognized by peers e.g., recipient of the 2019 Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs (APSAD) Clinician of the Year Award.

Clinical Associate Professor Montebello’s main research interests include randomised controlled trials of novel treatment interventions for substance use disorders, and improving treatments for co-morbidities occurring in people with substance use problems. Other research interests include understanding the impacts of substance use on cognition, treatment of Hepatitis C Virus in marginalised populations especially people using substances, and evaluation of Drug and Alcohol treatment services. He has received over AUD $24 million in grant funding as an investigator including nine NHMRC grants, one ARC grant and one Ramsay Research Grant. He has 57 peer reviewed publications including in high impact Q1 journals such as JAMA Int Med, JAMA Psychiatry, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, and Drug and Alcohol Review. Associate Professor Montebello's work has been cited 889 times by 771 documents, and has an H-index of 15 (Scopus).