Advisory Board

Generation Mental Health is lucky to have a fantastic board of advisors to contribute to the development of our programs!

Dr. Abhijit Nadkarni

Dr. Abhijit Nadkarni is a general adult and addictions psychiatrist trained in India and the UK. Having completed his medical degree and a specialized degree in psychiatry in Goa, India; he further pursued his post graduate training in General Adult and Addictions Psychiatry under the South London and Maudsley training scheme in UK. He then earned a Masters in Mental Health Services Research from the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College, London and did his PhD studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His research interests encompass global mental health, and particularly alcohol use disorders in India. He is actively involved in the capacity building of mental health researchers and lay health workers across India and other parts of the developing world. He is an Associate Professor of Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK and Co-Director of the Addictions Research Group at Sangath, Goa.

Dr. Fiona Jayne Charlson

Dr Fiona Charlson is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow specialised in Global Mental Health. She holds an affiliate position with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington for her ongoing work on the Global Burden of Disease Studies. Dr Charlson's PhD focused on the epidemiology and burden of mental disorders in conflict-affected populations and she now consults internationally on this topic. She received her undergraduate degree in pharmacy at the University of Queensland and has completed a Masters in International Public Health. Dr Charlson has over 20 years of experience in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Geneva, Africa, South East Asia and the Islands of the South Pacific and maintains several international research partnerships addressing mental health in developing countries.

Dr. Crick Lund

Dr. Crick Lund is a Professor of Global Mental Health and Development in the Centre for Global Mental Health, King’s College London, and Professor in the Alan J. Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health, University of Cape Town. He is the CEO of the Programme for improving mental health care (PRIME), a DFID funded research consortium focusing on the integration of mental health into primary care in low resource settings in five countries. He trained as a clinical psychologist at the University of Cape Town and was subsequently involved in developing post-apartheid norms for mental health services for the national Department of Health. He worked for WHO from 2000-2005, on the development of the WHO Mental Health Policy and Service Guidance Package, and has consulted to several countries on mental health policy and planning. His research interests lie in mental health policy, service planning and the relationship between poverty and mental health in low and middle-income countries.

Shinichi Daimyo

Shinichi Daimyo most recently acted as Senior Advisor for Mental Health at Partners In Health, providing key service delivery, training, research, strategy, management, and capacity building advisement for PIH’s mental health teams throughout the world. He managed the scale up of integrated community based mental health services into 11 district hospitals serving 1.3 million people in the Central Plateau and Artibonite region of Haiti, and acted as Co-Investigator for the scale up of integrated mental health services and mentoring and supervision of health center nurses in the Burera District of Rwanda. He also provided advisement for the creation and integration of community based mental health systems into the public sector primary care systems of Lesotho, Malawi, Peru, Mexico, and Russia. Shinichi is a graduate of the Yale School of Nursing and is a board certified Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner in the State of Pennsylvania. He currently acts as a psychiatric nurse practitioner for Project HOME, a nonprofit in Philadelphia aimed at eliminating chronic homelessness through sustainable housing, education, medical care, and employment.

Iregi Mwenja

Iregi Mwenja is a mental health advocate who has over 3 decades of lived experience. He grew up in rural Africa where faced the unbearable social challenges of growing up with undiagnosed ADHD. He received his diagnosis as an adult, a revelation that became a turning point in his life. Though an accomplished wildlife biologist, he left a well-paying job as a Country Director of an International NGO to establish a mental health non-profit - Psychiatric Disability Organization (PDO). PDO works to foster mental healthcare and advance the rights of people with mental illness focusing more on the socially disadvantaged in his community in Nakuru, Kenya. Through his organization, thousands of Kenyans have received free diagnosis and treatment, and the much-needed social support for those in recovery or those rejected or ostracized by society or their families. Iregi was a Mental Health Speaker at the 43rd UNAIDS Board meeting in Geneva. He is an Acumen Fellow and the Executive Committee member of the Global Mental Health Peer Network.

Dr. Laura Davidson

Dr. Laura Davidson is a London Barrister and a noted authority on mental health and capacity matters, human rights, and disability law. She is a regular visiting Academic Fellow in the law faculty at the University of Cape Town, and has undertaken research on psychosocial disability and trauma in northern Uganda. She is also an international development consultant, including drafting mental health legislation in Rwanda and advising on disability law in Zimbabwe.

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