Professionally, a clinical nutritionist from Uganda. In 2020, I moved to Montreal (Canada) as a MasterCard Foundation Scholar to pursue a Master of Science (MSc.) degree at McGill University. I graduated in 2022 with a Distinction. I then moved to London (England) in 2023 to pursue a PhD in Health Services and Population Research under the supervision of Crick Lund and Tatiana Salisbury at the IoPPN, as a King’s Africa International PGR Scholar. My PhD research project is interdisciplinary in nature and cuts across two interfaces: Global Mental Health and Global Food Security & Nutrition. I am investigating the relationship between food insecurity and mental health conditions among children and adolescents in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). To understand the social causation pathway in which food insecurity influences child and adolescent mental health (CAMH) and the social drift pathway in which CAMH might influence food security and nutrition in children and adolescents in SSA. This PhD research adds on my previous work, which has led to the development of the Day Scholars’ Food Insecurity Experience Scale (DSFIES), an instrument that development agencies could use to track the efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness of school feeding program, including targeted school feeding programs in Low Income Countries.

Research Interests

• Child and Adolescent Mental Health
• Clinical Trials and Prospective Cohort Studies
• Humanitarian Aid, Social Protection Programming: School Meals Program
• Longitudinal Studies for Food Security, Nutrition and Mental Health Research
• Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health and Nutrition
• Mixed Methods Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods
• Psychometrics: Development and Validation of Measures
• Social Determinants of Mental Health
• Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals
• Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Synthesis

Expertise and Public Engagement

• I work closely with the team at the Statistics Division (EES) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations to track data on the prevalence of food insecurity globally and to monitor the progress to achieve the zero hunger target (2.1) by 2030.
• I collaborate with the MasterCard Foundation (MCF), the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), the Seeding the Future Foundation and United States Agency for International Development, to scale NutriPosh® that offers cognitive benefits not provided by the status quo, to schoolchildren starting with Uganda.

Key Publication

Kasujja, I., Melgar-Quinonez, H., & Nambooze, J. (2023). Day Scholars Food Insecurity Experience Scale-Survey Module (DSFIES-SM): Psychometric Analysis. SAGE Open, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440231212757