Dr Tatiana Taylor Salisbury has been awarded a £1.2 million UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Future Leaders Fellowship to research and develop approaches to improve the mental health of teenage girls in Mozambique and Kenya during pregnancy and the year after birth.
UKRI’s flagship scheme invests in 90 outstanding individuals across the UK, supporting them to develop their careers while tackling ambitious challenges.
Dr Salisbury is a global mental health researcher and Joint Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health at the Institute of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience at King’s College London.
As a Future Leaders Fellow, she will be working on innovative approaches to developing scalable and sustainable approaches to adolescent maternal mental health interventions in Kenya and Mozambique.
Her research will engage with girls, their families, and other stakeholders in the development, refinement, and evaluation of an approach to improve the mental health of teenage girls with insight from placements at the World Health Organization and the Design School at Stanford University.
Becoming a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow is a fantastic vote of confidence in and recognition of my achievements and potential. With this award I aim to develop an intervention that reduces the risk of maternal depression and anxiety and gives adolescent mothers the hope and skills to make a good life for them and their children by packaging aspects of existing, evidence-based interventions in a way that is attractive to young mothers, their families and service providers.
Dr Tatiana Taylor Salisbury, UKRI Future Leaders Fellow
She continues, ‘It will allow me a previously unimaginable amount of time to fully concentrate on this research and continue to strengthen my research and leadership skills as well as build the capacity of researchers in Mozambique and Kenya. I can’t wait to start!’
Dr Tatiana Taylor SalisburyThe 90 UKRI Future Leaders Fellows have been announced today and the initiative aims to support the creation of a new cohort of research and innovation leaders who will have links across different sectors and disciplines. Awardees will each receive between £400,000 and £1.5 million over an initial four years. The grant supports challenging and novel projects, and the development of the individual. The breadth of research and innovation areas that these fellowships support is a key aspect of the scheme.
The Future Leaders Fellowships are UKRI’s flagship talent programme, designed to foster and nurture the research and innovation leaders of the future. We are delighted to support these outstanding researchers and innovators across universities, research organisations and businesses.
Sir Mark Walport, Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation
Kirsty Grainger, Director of the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowships, said: ‘The Future Leaders Fellows represent some of the most brilliant people working in the country. We’re supporting researchers from every background – from the arts to medicine, and the social sciences to engineering – helping them become the research and innovation leaders of the future.’
Also receiving a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship from King's College London is Dr Jana Hutter from the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine.
Contact: Franca Davenport, Interim Senior Press Officer, IoPPN: franca.davenport@kcl.ac.uk / +44 7718 697176
