Samia Akhter-Khan is a PhD candidate at the Health Service & Population Research Department. Her PhD project, supervised by Rosie Mayston and Matthew Prina, focuses on older adults’ loneliness in Southeast Asia. Applying both quantitative and qualitative methods, she explores the relationship between unpaid productive activities, such as caregiving and volunteering, and older adults’ loneliness from Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar, and explores solutions to loneliness using participatory approaches. Within her PhD work, Samia developed the Social Relationship Expectations Framework, a new theory for understanding loneliness, for which she received the APA Early Career Outstanding Paper Award 2023. Samia received a PhD fellowship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and a KCL Public Engagement Grant for her participatory action research project in northern Thailand.

Prior to joining King’s in 2021, Samia completed a BSc and MSc degree in Psychology at the Humboldt University Berlin. During her studies, she also spent a semester at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, two semesters at Duke University in the US, and one year in Myanmar for her master’s thesis research on older adults’ loneliness. In Myanmar, Samia volunteered with a local human rights organization and worked for HelpAge International.

Between 2020 and 2023, she also worked for Boston University School of Medicine investigating pathways from loneliness to Alzheimer’s disease using data from the Framingham Heart Study. For this work, Samia received the NIH-funded Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program pilot grant from Boston University. At King’s, Samia also worked on a World Health Organization report on climate change and healthy ageing.

Research Interests

Samia is interested in ageing and global mental health research, with a specific focus on exploring solutions to older adults’ loneliness. Her research applies interdisciplinary approaches, mixed methods, participatory action research, implementation science, and aims to foster international collaborations. Samia’s interests include valuing older people’s contributions, bridging the gap between science and practice, and early intervention.

• Ageing
• Loneliness
• Care and unpaid productive activities
• Mental health in Southeast Asia
• Mixed methods
• Precision health
• Participatory action research

Expertise and Public Engagement

Samia is passionate about science communication and networking, within and across academic and non-governmental sectors. She is a board member of the Myanmar-Institute e.V., a network of researchers working on issues relating to Myanmar. Following the military coup in 2021, Samia has been writing blog posts and newspaper articles, organising political campaigns, and helping journalists and activists leaving Myanmar.

At Duke University, Samia became a member of the Duke Revaluing Care in the Global Economy Network. She mentored students from different disciplines interested in valuing informal unpaid care, contributed work to the working paper seminar series, and created an online exhibition of her photovoice project with older migrants from Myanmar in Thailand. Since 2023, she has been on the advisory board for the research network.

Within these networks, Samia has participated in and helped organise several international conferences. Samia’s work has been featured in Science Magazine, The Guardian, BBC radio, Daily Mail, The Times, The Independent, and other outlets. She has contributed multiple blog posts, e.g., for the British Society of Gerontology, and spoken on podcasts for the Association for Psychological Science and Science Magazine. For updates on future projects and public engagement, follow Samia on Twitter.

Further details

See Samia's research profile