All are invited to attend a discussion on "Global Mental Health: Pathways to impact" with Pamela Collins, MD, MPH.

Collins is the director of the Office for Research on Disparities and Global Mental Health at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). She has played a leadership role in setting the global mental health research agenda through NIMH’s sweeping Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health effort begun in 2010, which brought together experts from more than 60 countries to set research priorities to address the mental health treatment gap. The results of this initiative were published in Nature in July 2011. The work led to the NIMH funding a set of global mental health research hubs, which were described in the May 11, 2014 edition of The Lancet. Collins has done incredible work raising the profile of global mental health issues and providing much-needed support that has led to significant progress in the field.

Speaker Background
Collins completed her medical education at Cornell University Medical College and subsequently trained in psychiatry and public health at Columbia University. She studied cultural psychiatry and applied medical anthropology as a research fellow in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She retains a faculty appointment at Columbia University in the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Department of Psychiatry and the Mailman School of Public Health. Over the past 15 years Collins’ work has focused on the mental health and psychosocial aspects of the AIDS epidemic in the United States and Sub-Saharan Africa. In the U.S., her studies have addressed social stigma related to mental illness, ethnicity, and women's HIV risk; the HIV prevention needs of women of color with severe mental illness; and the mental health needs of African immigrants living with HIV. She has conducted training of health care providers in mental health and HIV/AIDS transmission, prevention, and counseling in Argentina, Zambia, Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa. In South Africa Collins's research examined the role of mental health care providers in the development of HIV prevention interventions in psychiatric settings. She continues to study the integration of HIV and mental health services in sub-Saharan Africa.