Three decades at the intersection of gambling and youth development
Dr. Derevensky’s research career has focused on child and adolescent high-risk behaviours since the early 1990s, a period that predates the modern online gambling industry entirely. He co-founded the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors in 1992, at a time when the field of youth gambling research barely existed as a distinct academic discipline. Over more than three decades, that Centre has grown into one of the most cited research institutions globally for understanding how gambling products specifically affect younger populations, and Dr. Derevensky has been at its centre throughout.
His work spans clinical practice, treatment development, and policy consultation in roughly equal measure. He has served as a clinical consultant to numerous hospitals, school boards, government agencies, and corporations, and he has provided expert testimony before legislative bodies in several countries, work that has directly contributed to social policy and governmental changes around gambling regulation and youth protection. This combination of clinical depth and policy engagement is relatively rare in academic gambling research, where many researchers specialise in either treatment or policy but rarely move fluidly between both as Dr. Derevensky has throughout his career.
Academic record and research output
Dr. Derevensky has authored or co-authored four books and more than 60 book chapters, alongside over 280 peer-reviewed journal articles. His ResearchGate profile documents 327 total publications, with more than 14,000 citations and over 204,000 reads recorded across his body of work. He has been the keynote speaker and presenter at more than 200 national and international conferences, reflecting a publication record that has translated directly into sustained engagement with the broader academic and clinical community studying gambling and behavioural addiction.
He serves on the editorial board of multiple journals in the field, a role that places him at the point where new gambling research is evaluated before publication, continuously calibrating his understanding of what constitutes methodologically sound evidence in a field that moves quickly as gambling products themselves evolve. His frequent collaborators over the years, including Rina Gupta, Caroline Temcheff, and international colleagues studying gambling and high-risk behaviour across multiple countries, reflect a research network that spans well beyond a single institution or national context.
Research focus: where gaming and gambling meet
Much of Dr. Derevensky’s most relevant recent work, particularly for readers of this publication, concerns the convergence between gaming mechanics and gambling products. His 2021 paper “Between two worlds: Exploring esports betting in relation to problem gambling, gaming, and mental health problems,” published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, examines exactly the kind of territory that modern online casino and sportsbook platforms increasingly occupy: products that blend traditional gambling with gaming-adjacent mechanics like esports wagering, lootbox-style rewards, and gamified loyalty structures.
This research focus is directly applicable to evaluating platforms in 2026 that build promotional architecture around missions, achievements, lootboxes, and tiered progression systems alongside standard casino games and sportsbooks. Dr. Derevensky’s research has consistently found that younger adult players, who have often grown up engaging with lootbox and gamified reward mechanics in video games long before encountering formal gambling products, may interact with these features differently than older players who experienced gambling primarily through traditional formats. Understanding this distinction matters when evaluating how a modern platform’s reward architecture is likely to be experienced by different segments of its player base.
Migration between gaming and gambling
A recurring theme across Dr. Derevensky’s recent publications, including work titled “The migration between gaming and gambling: Our current knowledge,” examines how players move between gaming and gambling contexts, and what that migration pattern means for prevention and harm reduction approaches. This research is particularly relevant to evaluating platforms that explicitly blend the two categories, offering gambling products wrapped in gaming-style engagement mechanics rather than presenting as traditional casino products alone.
Cross-national prevalence research
Dr. Derevensky has also contributed to cross-national comparative research examining gambling and problem gambling prevalence among young people across Australia, Canada, Croatia, and Israel, alongside studies on the role of accessibility in higher-risk gambling. This comparative international perspective informs how he evaluates platform accessibility design, including how easy or difficult it is for a young adult player to access gambling products, how promotional advertising is targeted, and how responsible gambling tools are presented relative to the platform’s core engagement features.
Clinical practice alongside research
Beyond his publication record, Dr. Derevensky directs the McGill University Youth Gambling Research and Treatment Clinic, which provides direct clinical services alongside its research function. This clinical grounding means his academic work isn’t purely theoretical; it’s continuously informed by direct contact with young people and families navigating gambling-related difficulties. This combination of clinical practice and academic research is part of what distinguishes his perspective when evaluating gambling platforms for a general readership: he’s writing from a position informed by what he has actually seen happen to real people, not solely from statistical models or laboratory findings.
His clinical consultation work has extended to government agencies including SAMHSA (the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), NIMH, the National Research Council, and the National Council on Problem Gambling, reflecting an applied research profile that has shaped policy and treatment standards well beyond McGill University itself.
What Dr. Derevensky’s perspective brings to platform reviews
When Dr. Derevensky reviews a casino or gambling platform for this publication, his analysis tends to focus on areas that purely commercial review sites often overlook: the specific design of gamified reward systems and what they share structurally with traditional gambling mechanics, the adequacy of responsible gambling tools relative to the platform’s actual engagement architecture, and whether a platform’s stated support resources genuinely match the jurisdiction of the players it’s serving.
This last point has been a recurring theme in his coverage of offshore platforms in 2026, several of which reference responsible gambling resources built for one jurisdiction (commonly the United Kingdom) while serving players from entirely different countries, including Canada, where those referenced resources have no actual application or enforcement relationship. Dr. Derevensky’s clinical and policy background gives him a specific sensitivity to this kind of gap, since identifying where stated protections don’t actually reach the populations a platform serves is precisely the kind of policy-relevant analysis his career has been built around.
Contact and professional resources
Dr. Derevensky’s research programme and clinic information are available through the McGill University Youth Gambling Research and Treatment Clinic at youthgambling.mcgill.ca, and through the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-Risk Behaviors, which he co-founded and continues to direct. His full publication record and citation metrics are available through his ResearchGate profile and through Research.com’s academic profile database. His McGill University faculty profile, listing his current courses, research projects, and departmental role as Chair of the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, is available through McGill’s Faculty of Education website.
