Professor Vikram Patel

India

Pershing Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Professor Patel is the Co-Founder and former Director of the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Co-Director of the Centre for Control of Chronic Conditions at the Public Health Foundation of India, and the Co-Founder of Sangath, an Indian NGO dedicated to research in the areas of child development, adolescent health, and mental health. Since 2016 he has been Pershing Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of Harvard Medical School in Boston. He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellowship in 2015.

He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the UK. His book Where There Is No Psychiatrist has become a widely used manual for community mental health in developing countries. He was the lead editor of theLancet Series on Global Mental Health (2007) and the PLoS Medicine series on packages of care for mental and neurological disorders in developing countries (2009) and a co-editor of the Lancet series on promoting universal health care in India (2011).

He led the efforts to set up the Movement for Global Mental Health. He is based in Goa, India where he leads a program of public health research and capacity development with Sangath, the Public Health Foundation of India and other partners focusing on three broad areas: child development, adolescent health and mental health.