David Otiashvili

David Otiashvili, MD, PhD is Director of the Addiction Research Centre at Alternative Georgia and Associate Professor of Healthcare at the School of Natural Sciences and Medicine at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia.

David graduated from Tbilisi State Medical University in 1992 and received the training and qualifications to become a Psychiatrist. He spent ten years in clinical work treating patients with substance use disorders. Between 2003-2004 he conducted substance abuse research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA as a NIDA Hubert Humphrey Fellow. In 2014, he received a PhD in Health Psychology from Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. For the last decade his major focus has been on research and education programs in the fields of substance use and HIV.

He served as a PI and Co-I for a number of international collaborative research projects, including RCTs and epidemiological studies. He has been actively involved in establishing a national drug monitoring mechanism in Georgia and serves as an expert for quality assurance on drug related data collection.