Building the Evidence Base for Brain and Mental Health in MENA

Group leader of the Mental Health | Policy | Economics group at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, and Affiliated Researcher at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. An academic psychiatrist, public health researcher, and health economist, his work spans the nexus of health policy, socio-economic determinants, and mental health outcomes. He leads the health systems stream of the Lancet Commission on Problematic Use of the Internet, and holds appointments at Maastricht University, LSE, and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Past roles include Harkness Fellow at Stanford and Gillings Fellow at Cambridge and Institut Louis Pasteur.

Independent researcher and final-year PhD candidate in Health Economics and Policy at Lancaster University. Her doctoral work advances the economic evaluation of policy interventions at the intersection of social protection and health systems. With publications in leading peer-reviewed journals, her research focuses on leveraging rigorous evidence to address socio-economic and health challenges in low- and middle-income countries, with particular focus on the MENA region.

Psychiatrist trained at the University of Constantine (2005), with more than a decade in Algeria's public hospital system before entering private practice, and advanced postgraduate diplomas from the Universities of Nancy and Paris. His work spans social and cultural psychiatry, religion and mental health, the legacy of colonial psychiatry, and mental health legislation. In BJPsych International, the journal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he authored "Psychiatric services in Algeria" and "Mental health legislation in Algeria," mapping the country's facilities, workforce, training, and legal framework. He has also compiled a concise bibliography of Algerian psychiatric scholarship since the nineteenth century. He anchors NeuroMENA's Algeria analysis in frontline clinical knowledge and historical depth.