Road Safety in 10 Countries Collaborator Visits the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit

On Friday, January 18, 2013, Dr. Flavio Pechansky, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Federal University of Rio Grand do Sul and Director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Research in Brazil, visited the Johns Hopkins International Injury Research Unit (JH-IIRU).

Dr. Pechansky is one of JH-IIRU’s lead collaborators on the Road Safety in 10 Countries project (RS-10) in  Brazil, and has, in that capacity, contributed to several scientific papers, including, “Why Don’t Northern American Solutions to Drinking and Driving Work in Southern America?” which appeared in Addiction, and “Road Traffic Deaths in Brazil: Rising Trends in Pedestrian and Motorcycle Occupant Deaths,” which appeared in the special issue of Traffic Injury Prevention in 2012. 

His connections to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health extend beyond his collaborations with JH-IIRU.  From 1993 to 1994, Dr. Pechansky was a Humphrey Fellow at the Bloomberg School, focusing on substance abuse policy, treatment and research.  In 2003, he established the Porto Alegre Center for Drug Abuse Studies in order to train young investigators in drug abuse and addiction research.