Barak B.Sc.Pharm, M.A., Ph.D. is a pharmacist, researcher, and policy coordinator at the Israel Ministry of Health pharmaceutical crime unit. His work involves research of trends in falsified, substandard, fake, and counterfeit medicine use and trafficking. Additionally, he helps produce and edit risk assessment reports on novel psychoactive substances and health systems’ assessment reports for policy use.
Between 2016 and 2020, Barak was a Ph.D. candidate at the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His doctoral research used a mixed-methods approach to identify prevalent drug switching patterns among patients with substance use disorders and co-occurring mental health disorders. Barak’s current research agenda involves using electronic health records and causal inference methods to identify people at-risk for opioid use disorder.