Vikram Patel, BS, MB, PhD

Vikram Patel is The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Welcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the Harvard Medical School. He co-leads the GlobalMentalHealth@Harvard initiative. His work has focused on the burden of mental health problems, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment. He is a co-founder of 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. He 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 V+iO High Level Independent Commission for NCDs. He co-led the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health & Sustainable Development and the Lancet-World Psychiatric Association Commission on Depression. He has been awarded the Chalmers Medal (the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, UK), the Samat Prize (the National Academy of Medicine, US), the Pardes Humanitarian Prize (the Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation, US), an Honorary QBE (UK Government) and the John Dirk Canada Gairdner Award in Global Health. He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Georgetown University, York University and Stellenbosch University. He was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.