VIKRAM PATEL

Vikram Patel PhD, MB, BS is The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health in the Blavatnik Institute's Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He co-leads the Department’s Mental Health for All lab and co-leads the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative, and Empower, which aims to empower anyone, anywhere, to master the delivery of evidence-based psychological treatments and behavioral interventions.

Vikram’s work has focused on the burden of mental health problems across the life course, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment. He is a co-founder of the Movement for Global Mental Health, the Centre for Global Mental Health (at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), the Mental Health Innovations Network, and Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the WHO Public Health Champion of India prize.

Vikram is a Fellow of the UK's Academy of Medical Sciences and has served on the Committee which drafted India’s first National Mental Health Policy and the WHO High Level Independent Commission for NCDs. He has been awarded the Chalmers Medal (the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, UK), the Sarnat Prize (the National Academy of Medicine, USA), the Pardes Humanitarian Prize (the Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation, USA), an Honorary OBE (the UK Government), the Posey Leadership Award (Austin College, USA) and the John Dirk Canada Gairdner Award in Global Health (the Canada Gairdner Foundation). He was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.

Affiliations:

• Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow

• Professor in the Department of Global Health and Population at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

• Co-founder and Member of Managing Committee, Sangath, Goa, India

• Adjunct Professor, Public Health Foundation of India, India

• Honorary Professor, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK