Vikram Patel

Vikram Patel is the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He also holds honorary Professorships at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Public Health Foundation of India. He co-leads the Department’s Mental Health for All lab and co-leads the Global Mental Health at Harvard initiative.

Patel's work has focused on the burden of mental health problems across the life course, their association with social disadvantage, and the use of community resources for their prevention and treatment. He is a co-founder of the Movement for Global Mental Health, the Centre for Global Mental Health (at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine), the Mental Health Innovations Network, and Sangath, an Indian NGO which won the WHO Public Health Champion of India prize and the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize.

Patel is also a Fellow of the UK's Academy of Medical Sciences and member of the US National Academy of Medicine. He served on the Committee which drafted India’s first National Mental Health Policy and the WHO High Level Independent Commission for Non-Communicable Diseases. He co-led the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health & Sustainable Development and the Lancet-World Psychiatric Association Commission on Depression. He leads the Lancet Citizens Commission on Reimagining India’s Healthcare System.

He has been awarded the Chalmers Medal (Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, UK); the Sarnat Prize (National Academy of Medicine, USA); the Pardes Humanitarian Prize (the Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation, USA); the Klerman Senior Investigator Prize (the Depression and Bipolar Disorder Alliance, USA); an Honorary OBE (UK Government); and the John Dirk Canada Gairdner Award in Global Health (Canada). He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from Georgetown University (USA), York University (UK), Stellenbosch University (South Africa) and the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands). Patel was listed in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential persons of the year in 2015.