Scientific Board
Our Scientific Board reviews progress and direction of our research, provides feedback on the research strategy, and advises on performance, impact and engagement, partnerships and capacity-building. You can view details of members below.
Rochelle Burgess
Dr. Burgess is a leading community health psychologist who specialises in community-based approaches to health. Her work studies the social and psychological dynamics of community engagement, using qualitative, participatory and transformative methodologies. She is interested in the promotion of community approaches to health globally, and views communities as a route to understanding and responding to the political economy of poor health, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of broader development issues such as poverty, gender, systems of governance, and community mobilisation (civil society). For the past decade she has focused on mental wellbeing and the experience of common mental disorders and is a leading voice in the emerging field of social interventions in Global Mental Health. She has led a range of projects that focus on the development of community mental health interventions (in South Africa, Colombia, UK and Zimbabwe) and has contributed her methodological and mental health expertise to projects on community led responses to other health challenges.
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Tamsin Ford
Tamsin Ford is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. She is an internationally renowned Child Psychiatric Epidemiologist who researches the organisation, delivery, and effectiveness of services and interventions for children and young people’s mental health. Her work is inherently translational and cross-disciplinary, and focuses on how to promote mental health, prevent mental ill-health and respond effectively to children and young people who are currently struggling. Her research covers the full range of psychopathology and agencies, practitioners and interventions that relate to the mental health of children and young people, and has direct relevance to policy, commissioning and practice. For example, papers relating mental health to exclusion were referenced in the Timpson report (2019) and she leads the clinical rating for the national child mental health survey, which provided statistics for the NHS Plan. With over 16,000 citations, she has received numerous awards, including a CBE for services to Psychiatry (2019). She provides research advice to Place2Be and is a board member of ACAMH.
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Sandro Galea
A physician, epidemiologist, and author, is dean and Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. In 2015, he became the youngest public health dean in the country, assuming leadership of Boston University School of Public Health. One of the most widely-cited scholars in the social sciences, Galea has published more than 950 scientific journal articles, 70 chapters, and 19 books. He has published extensively in the peer-reviewed literature about the social causes of health, mental health, and trauma. He has documented the consequences of mass trauma and conflict worldwide, including as a result of the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His research has been principally funded by the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and philanthropic foundations. He is past chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health and past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He formerly served as chair of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Community Services Board and as member of its Health Board. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine. Galea has received several lifetime achievement awards for his research, including the Rema Lapouse Award from the American Public Health Association and the Robert S. Laufer, PhD, Memorial Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is a regular contributor to media, including The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Boston Globe, TEDMED, and The New York Times.
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Norman Lamb
A long-standing and active campaigner for mental health, Sir Norman Lamb has worked to challenge stigma around mental health and to ensure people with mental health issues are treated with the same priority as patients with physical health needs. A former health minister from 2012 to 2015, Sir Norman introduced the first access and waiting time standards in mental health care for the treatment of mental health problems like depression and anxiety, and for patients experiencing a first episode of psychosis. Prior to this he was also a Minister in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. In 2019, Sir Norman Lamb received a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours for his public and political service, notably his contribution to mental health.
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Tanya Luhrman
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She is a medical and psychological anthropologist, and also an anthropologist of religion. More recently she describes her work as an anthropology of mind. She sets out to understand the way people represent thought itself, and the way those culturally varied representations shape the most intimate experience of life itself. She asks how the world is made real for people, and how that realness shapes a person’s sense of capacity and purpose. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007.
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Michael Marmot
Professor Sir Michael Marmot is Professor of Epidemiology at University College London, Director of the UCL Institute of Health Equity, and Past President of the World Medical Association. He is the author of The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (Bloomsbury: 2015) and Status Syndrome: how your place on the social gradient directly affects your health (Bloomsbury: 2004). Professor Marmot holds the Harvard Lown Professorship for 2014-2017 and is the recipient of the Prince Mahidol Award for Public Health 2015. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from 18 universities. In 2021 Professor Marmot received BMJ's Outstanding Contribution to Health award. Professor Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for over 40 years. At the request of the British Government, he conducted the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England, which published its report 'Fair Society, Healthy Lives' in February 2010. This was followed by the 'European Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide', for WHO Euro in 2014. In February 2020, Professor Marmot launched the ‘Marmot Review 10 Years On’, which serves as an update to the ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’ review. In December 2020 he published 'Build Back Fairer: The COVID 19 Marmot Review'.
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Katherine Sacks-Jones
Katharine is the Chief Executive of Become, the national charity for children in care and young care leavers. Become helps children in care and young care leavers to believe in themselves and to heal, grow and unleash their potential. They do this through direct support to young people, driving improvements in practice, and campaigning for changes to policy & practice. They ensure that the voices of children in care and young care leavers are listened to and their rights upheld. Katharine has over 15 years’ experience working across policy, campaigns, public affairs and parliament and has worked in the charity sector for the last 10 years. Her focus has been on disadvantage and inequality – she has worked on issues including homelessness, unemployment, multiple disadvantage, mental health and domestic and sexual abuse. Katharine has spoken about and written extensively on disadvantage and inequality issues and has sat on and chaired government advisory groups. Before joining Become, Katharine was the inaugural Chief Executive of Agenda, the alliance for women and girls at risk. In 2018 she co-chaired the Government’s Women’s Mental Health Taskforce. Katharine has held a number of trusteeships and is currently a trustee of Children England.
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Hári Sewell
Hári Sewell is founder and director of HS Consultancy and is a former executive director of health and social care in the National Health Service in the UK serving on the Board for 7 years. He has worked for the Department of Health in regulation and policy. Hári is a writer and speaker in his specialist area of social justice, equalities and ethnicity and race and culture in mental health. Hári is a Specialist Guest Lecturer at University of Bradford and Visiting Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University. Hari is also a Member of the Scientific Board of the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health and Co-opted Member of the Council for the British Association of Social Workers. Hári has had various books, articles and book chapters published with new material emerging regularly. Hári worked with a local campaigner to secure services for survivors of sexual violence and currently runs a campaign “Men Supporting Women’s Rights” including “Men Against Rape”. He is increasingly studying forms of masculinity and the possibilities in practice and employee relations to recognise the intersections between masculinity and other aspects of identity.
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Denese Shervington
Dr. Denese Shervington has an intersectional career in public health and academic psychiatry. She is the President of The Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies (IWES), a community-based translational public health institute in New Orleans. She is also the Chair of Psychiatry at Charles R. Drew University. Dr. Shervington has held Clinical Professorships in the Departments of Psychiatry at Columbia University and Tulane University. A graduate of New York University School of Medicine, she also received a Masters of Public Health in Population Studies and Family Planning from Tulane University School of Public Health, and is a member of the American College of Psychiatrists. She co-chairs the New Orleans City Council Children Youth Planning Board Taskforce on Childhood Trauma. She has authored several papers in peer-reviewed journals addressing health disparities, the social determinants of health and resilience in underserved communities. Her recent publication is Healing Is the Revolution, a guide to healing from historical, intergenerational, interpersonal and community trauma. She also hosts a podcast on trauma.
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Professor Sir Simon Wessely is Professor of Psychological Medicine and Regius Professor of Psychiatry at King’s College London and a Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist at King’s College and the Maudsley Hospitals. In 2020 he was appointed to the Council of the ESRC. He has over 800 original publications, with an emphasis on the boundaries of medicine and psychiatry, unexplained symptoms and syndromes, population reactions to adversity, military health, epidemiology and others. He founded the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, which is now the main source of information on the health and well-being of the UK Armed Forces past and present. He has been Civilian Consultant Advisor in Psychiatry to the British Army since 2001, and is also a trustee of the charity Combat Stress. He has co-authored books on chronic fatigue syndrome, randomised controlled trials and a history of military psychiatry, although sadly none of them are best sellers. He is active in public engagement activities, speaking regularly on radio, TV and at literary and science festivals.
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