Tara Carney is employed as a Specialist Scientist (seasoned) in the Mental Health, Alcohol, Substance Use and Tobacco Research Unit of the South African Medical Research Council. She has a PhD from Psychiatry and Mental Health Department from the University of Cape Town, where she is an honorary associate professor and teaches various postgraduate and Masters-level courses and is also a senior research associate at the Department of Psychology, University of Johannesburg. She supervises students at both Master and PhD level.
She is an associate editor for PLOS Global Health, as well as BMC Public Health as well as a highly rated researcher in South Africa where she currently leads a number of internationally-funded studies.
Her research interests include the relationship between substance use and health (including well-being as well as disease in terms of health outcomes). Her focus has been on substance use and mental health among adolescents and young people, including developing, testing, and disseminating culturally-sensitive biobehavioural interventions for substance use and mental health issues in low-resource settings, particularly in southern Africa. She is particularly interested in addressing the needs of young people and how to incorporate important others including romantic partners and peers, and social determinants of health, into these interventions, as well as how to address stigma often experienced by people who use substances.