Vikram Patel is The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome 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 disorders, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment.
He holds Honorary Professorships at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, the Public Health Foundation of India, and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (where he co-founded the Centre for Global Mental Health and the Mental Health Innovations Network). He is a co-founder of Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008 and the WHO Public Health Champion of India award in 2016. He is a co-founder of the Movement for Global Mental Health. He is a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences and has served on several WHO expert and Government of India committees, including the Committee which drafted India’s first National Mental Health Policy and the WHO High Level Independent Commission for Non-Communicable Diseases and Mental Health.
He has been awarded the Chalmers Medal (Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, UK), the Sarnat International Prize (US National Academy of Medicine), an Honorary Doctorate from Georgetown University, the Pardes Humanitarian Prize (the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation), an Honorary OBE from the UK Government and the John Dirk Canada Gairdner Award in Global Health in 2019. He was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.
