Mauricio is leading the anti-poverty component of the intervention development (Work Package 3). He is Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne. He is based at the Department of Epidemiology and Health Systems, Centre for Primary Care and Public Health (Unisanté), where he co-leads the Health Policy Unit. He is also adjunct Associate Professor at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health and faculty member at the Harvard Centre of Population and Development Studies, and visiting Professor in Public Policy & Global Health at King’s College London. Prior to joining the University of Lausanne, he held academic appointments at King’s College London (2015-2021), the London School of Economics (2011-2015), Harvard University (2008-2010) and the Erasmus Rotterdam University (2002-2011). His research examines how public policies, social transformations and health systems contribute to health inequalities between and within countries. His work is interdisciplinary and at the crossroads between epidemiology and public health, economics, demography, sociology and public policy.

Ricardo serves as a senior advisor on ALIVE, and is part of Work Package 2 (Theoretical model) and Work Package 3 (Intervention development). Ricardo is a professor of Global Mental Health at King’s College London. His research interests include the aetiology of common mental disorders, inequalities and their link to the mental health of populations with special emphasis on international comparisons, and effective treatments for common mental disorders, such as simple and brief interventions using non-medical workers and strong community participation. Several of his current projects use technological platforms to support the delivery of mental health interventions. He is involved in projects in a large number of countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He has a special interest in projects that integrate mental health problems in the care of other diseases, such as hypertension, diabetes, and HIV.

Shari Baddan is part of the qualitative research team for ALIVE in Colombia. She gratuated as a Professional in Government and Public Affairs and is currently undergoing a Masters in Psychology. Shari is passionate about studying how young people who live under multidimensional poverty understand mental health and the tools they need in order to perform in their educational environments, life projects and relationships with others.

Annette is co-leading Work Package 6 on youth engagement and contributes to other work packages concerned with generating the knowledge base for the development and testing of self-regulation interventions. For this she contributes her particular interest in impact and process evaluations using mixed-method designs, including those that apply theory-informed and realist approaches. Annette is Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is an economist and mixed method researcher with a focus on (economic) evaluations of complex mental health and social care interventions in real world settings. Her areas of expertise include maternal, child and youth mental health. Over the past ten years she has led and contributed to a wide range of international research projects that estimate the economic impacts of mental health problems, and on the return-on-investment for scaling interventions. Her work on the costs of perinatal mental illness had major impact on policy and practice in the United Kingdom and beyond.

Dr. Tarun Dua is a medical officer working on the Program for Neurological Diseases and Neuroscience, Management of Mental and Brain Disorders in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at the World Health Organization. In this role Dr. Dua serves as the liaison between the WHO and the International League Against Epilepsy, provides expert advice on the formulation and implementation of the Global Campaign Against Epilepsy (GCAE) worldwide, and assists in the development and updating of a plan of action for the GCAE. She is currently the technical focal point responsible for all activities concerning neurology within the organization.

María Cecilia co-leads the Alive project in Colombia. She oversees the formative qualitative work, the implementation of the intervention in Bogotá, and the youth engagement work with the local adolescent advisory group. María Cecilia is a socio-cultural psychologist and associate professor at Los Andes University School of Government. Her research focuses on the impact of social vulnerability on mental health outcomes and interpersonal violence among young people, with a focus on the social determinants of mental health. Her latest
work has explored the role of community participation in improving  mental health interventions and policy.

Georgia will assist in coordinating Work Package 4 (Instrument validation). She is a behavioral scientist with strong observation, research, and communication skills. Since 2019, she has worked as Behavioral Scientist at the World Bank Group on designing and validating an online psychometric profiling tool for unemployed and inexperienced South African youth to help place them in meaningful employment. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate in the UK on developing several intervention programs for measuring the quality of early learning programs and implementing online cognitive assessment tools across the lifespan. She has thought several undergraduate courses in Psychology in various universities and supervised research projects at an undergraduate and postgraduate level. Georgia holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Cyprus, a master’s degree in Child Developmental Psychology, and a Ph.D., in Cognitive Neuropsychology both from the University of Surrey in the UK.

Sara is the co-leader of Work Package 2 focused on the realist synthesis and qualitative formative work to examine underlying mechanisms linking poverty, self-regulation and depression and anxiety among adolescents. Sara is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Care Policy and Evaluation Centre. Her research has focused key issues of importance in global mental health particularly around the social and economic impacts of mental health problems. She approaches these issues using interdisciplinary methods which integrate insights from public health, psychiatry and economics. She is the PI of CHANCES-6 which investigates the dynamics between poverty, mental health and young people’s life chances, by examining the impact of cash transfer interventions on youth mental health & life chances.

Juan Felipe works as a Research Manager at IPA Colombia, ALIVE’s implementation partner. Before joining IPA, he led efforts to establish evidence-based operations within ICBF, the Colombian government agency in charge of implementing early childhood development policy throughout the country. Prior to that, Juan Felipe was a Research Fellow at the Inter-American Development Bank, where he evaluated the Bank’s efforts to support Argentina, Colombia, Panamá, and Chile. His research career began at Fundación Ideas para la Paz, where he was part of the team running one of the first policing program RCTs in Colombia. Juan Felipe holds an MPA from Columbia University and an MA in Economics from Universidad de los Andes, where he also received BAs in Political Science and Economics.

Emily is ALIVE’s Scientific Coordinator. She is a senior researcher in the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Emily has over 8 years of experience as data manager and biostatistician, working on various international research projects such as the Africa Focus on Intervention Research for Mental Health (AFFIRM) and the Programme for Improving Mental Health Care (PRIME) and CHANCES-6, a project which focuses on investigating the mechanisms between poverty, mental health and life chances of young people in six low- and middle-income countries. With a background in psychology and developmental psychopathology in the UK, Emily obtained her PhD from the University of Cape Town in 2019, which focused on perinatal depression, which remains one of her key research interests. Other research interests lie in the integration of mental health care into community and primary care settings for vulnerable populations in low-resourced settings, including adolescents and perinatal women.

As an ALIVE collaborator, Dr Kamal will primarily be involved in intervention development (Work Package 3) and adolescent and stakeholder engagement (Work Package 6). Dr Kamal (MBBS, MD Psych) is the Executive Director of Transcultural Psychosocial Organization Nepal. He has a sound experience working with adolescents in Nepal. He was the Country-PI for a multi-country research project entitled “Identifying Depression Early in Adolescence” led by Kings College London. He is also a Co-investigator in another ongoing research project of TPO Nepal that aims to develop and test the feasibility of a sports-based mental health promotion intervention for adolescents in Nepal. He has been working closely with the Ministry of Health and Population, provincial and local government bodies and other government and non-government stakeholders in Nepal especially in policy reforms and uptake. He has contributed to formation, operationalization and engagement of youth advisory groups in various research activities at TPO Nepal.

Chloe is passionate about financial well-being encompassing financial education, financial inclusion, entrepreneurship, and EdTech with a focus on women. She's worked in this field for over 12 years in Africa and the Middle East. In 2019, she starts Fiinafas with the support of other experts having massive experience in Africa and the MENA as well. In 2023, Fiinafas is taking a fresh start with the specific mission to unlock the potential of vulnerable youth and women to reach their financial well-being. Fiinafas proposes a financial well-being coaching
solution (hybrid solution: tech and interaction-based), as well as develops impactful and innovative financial well-being content and approaches and enables access to reliable, independent and at large-scale financial well-being data. 

In 2021, she joins Empow'Her as the Africa Regional Manager to support the growth and structuring of the network in Western Africa to develop impactful projects to support women
entrepreneurship across the region. Before, she worked at PPI whose mission is to fight global poverty by developing economic, social and environmental inclusion in a sustainable and equitable way.

She's supported more than 200 organisations in more than 15 countries for over 5000 beneficiaries from diverse backgrounds and has worked with a wide range of stakeholders including public and private entities such as the EU, IFC, AFD, UNICEF, Symrise of the Occitane Foundation

Mark is one of two Principal Investigators for ALIVE. Mark is Professor of Child and Adolescent Global Mental Health at the Center for Global Mental Health, King’s College London, and Professor Child and Adolescent Global Mental Health at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. He is a child psychologist and works as Director of Research & Development for the NGO War Child in the Netherlands. His research interests are the development, implementation and evaluation of psychosocial and mental health care systems in low and middle income countries, especially for children in adversities and in fragile states. Mark is the founder and Senior Technical Advisor of TPO Nepal, a mental health NGO in Nepal. He is an advisor to several global mental health initiates, including several WHO Expert Committees and the MHPSS Collaborative for Children and Families in Adversity. He was a commissioner for the Lancet Commission Report on Global Mental Health.

Nagendra is a co-principle investigator, and country lead for the ALIVE project in Nepal. He is the head of research department at Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) Nepal, a national non-governmental organization in Nepal. He is also the Wellcome Trust international training fellow. He holds a PhD on the integration of mental health services into the primary and community healthcare system in Nepal from University of Amsterdam. Nagendra has been involved in mental health research since 2006, and has made significant contributions in development and evaluation of community based mental health services that can be delivered by non-specialist healthcare providers. His research interests include assessment of mental health problems and service needs, adaptation and validation of mental health instruments, and development and evaluation of community-based interventions to increase utilization of mental health services. He is an author of more than 80 articles in international peer-reviewed journals.

Crick is one of two Principal Investigators of ALIVE. He is Professor of Global Mental Health and Development in the Centre for Global Mental Health, Health Services and Population Research Department, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, and Honorary Professor in the Alan J. Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health (CPMH), Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town (UCT). He trained as a clinical psychologist at UCT in the mid-1990s and was subsequently involved in developing post-apartheid norms for mental health services for the national Department of Health. He worked for the World Health Organisation (WHO) from 2000 to 2005 and has consulted to several countries on mental health policy and planning. He was a founding member of the CPMH and served as its first Director, from 2010 to 2017. His research interests lie in mental health policy, service planning and the relationship between poverty and mental health in low and middle-income countries.

Brandon’s role in ALIVE is to lead the instrument development and validation aspect of the research. Brandon is a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist who has worked for 25 years to improve mental health services in countries affected by war, disasters, epidemics, and other forms of adversity around the world. He holds the Charles and Sonia Akman Professorship in Global Psychiatry at George Washington University, where he is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Global Health, and Anthropology, and Director of the Global Mental Health Equity Lab. Brandon has sought to combat the stigma associated with mental illness through work with The Carter Center Mental Health Program, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and service user advocacy groups around the world. He developed the “RESHAPE mental health” intervention to reduce mental illness stigma among healthcare providers. Brandon serves on the Lancet Commission on Stigma and Discrimination in Mental Health.

In ALIVE, Lydia is involved in the development and validation of instruments for self-regulation and the development of the self-regulation intervention. Lydia is full professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and head of the department Clinical, Neuro and Developmental Psychology. She also holds a visiting professorship at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neurosciences, Kings’ College London. She obtained her PhD in 2000 at the Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) and continued working at this institute before moving to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2009. Her research focuses on social cognitive development in adolescence and early adulthood and how this development is related to characteristics of the social and cultural environment. An important aspect of her work is bridging science and society in the field of mind, brain and education, by including adolescents, parents and teachers in the design and implementation of her research.

Anton serves as an advisor on ALIVE, specifically around the intervention development (Work Package 3). Anton is the director and founder of SaveAct in South Africa. His focus is on inclusive sustainable livelihood methodologies, with an emphasis on savings-led social and economic development. He has experiences in programme design and scaling approaches across regions, working with multiple partners in implementation. SaveAct’s focus is on enabling people to recognise their capabilities and work with their assets to achieve sustainable outcomes. Anton has taken a pilot initiative to scale, with there being 5 500 savings groups (over 100 000 members) in six provinces in South Africa. Savings levels are high, with members investing in enterprise and food security, assisted through access to financial education, enterprise development and livelihood pathway support. This work has spanned youth, women and people with disabilities, and rural and urban environments.

Nomthandazo joins the team as an advisor on ALIVE, specifically around the economic aspect of the intervention (Work Package 3). She is a project coordinator at SaveAct, where she has worked for 10 years, starting as a Field Officer in 2013. She is responsible for field trainings and mentorship on Savings and financial education in KwaZulu Natal in South Afria. She also supervises and supports a team of field staff. Nomthy is currently interested in knowing more about Enterprise development and working with youth on savings and financial education.

Nabeel is involved in the design, implementation and evaluation of the adolescent and other stakeholder engagement processes (Work Package 6). As a Wellcome Trust International Engagement Fellow, Co-Director of The Pivot Collective and the Director of Interfer, Nabeel explores inclusive, collaborative, co-created interventions, research and engagement between citizens/people, the Arts and Science/Institutions to co-design and provide health (and other) messaging and public engagement in fun, relative and interactive ways for greater impact.
With foundations in participatory design and research, anthropology and engagement design, he believes that inclusive models have the natural inclination to be catalysts for social transformation, transformative research and greater impact. He strives toward inclusive and relative approaches to spark and develop meaningful transformation and relationships, challenge existing practice and structures, and stimulate meaningful and necessary dialogue and sharing, both locally and globally.

Sanchari is co-leading the anti-poverty component of Work Package 3 for the ALIVE intervention. Sanchari is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Development Economics at King’s College London, UK. Her primary areas of research include gender and development, education, mental health and public service delivery. Sanchari’s research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals like the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, World Development etc. Her work has received press coverage in The New York Times, BBC, The Economist, NDTV, The Hindu, Deccan Herald etc. In addition, she has also published work related to issues pertaining to the Indian economy in the Economic and Political Weekly, as well as written for the popular press, including The Guardian, Outlook magazine, The Wire etc. Sanchari completed her PhD in Economics from London School of Economics. Prior to joining King’s College London, Sanchari taught at the University of Warwick and the University of Sussex in UK.

Manuel is ALIVE’s Project Manager. He holds a PhD in Politics from King’s College London (KCL). He is a mixed-methods researcher with expertise in areas such as social norms and regional inequalities. His doctoral research focused on exploring within-country variations in the provision of public services (e.g., public health) and the quality of democracy. He examines the socio-economic and political determinants of regional disparities and is currently working at King’s Global Health Institute (KGHI) on Wellcome Trust and NIHR funded research projects. Prior to joining KCL, he worked at the Ministry of Development, the National Jury of Elections, the Presidential Office in Peru, and as a consultant for International IDEA. In these roles, he provided policy advice, drafted policy briefs, delivered capacity-building programmes, and implemented education and development policies.

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Rakesh is country lead for Work Package 2 (Formative qualitative research and realist synthesis) and co-lead for other work packages- intervention development, tool validation, pilot-RCT, and youth engagement.Rakesh is a public health professional who has substantial experience in academia and research. He has been honored with Academic Excellence Award by the President of Nepal in 2014. His professional career spans nine years of work as a faculty at medical universities in Nepal. He excels in mental health research with especial interest in adolescent and global mental health. He has considerable experience in implementing collaborative large scale researches at global level. He has around three dozens of publications in national/international peer-reviewed journals. He has been currently engaged in Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) Nepal as Research Coordinator for the ALIVE project. He has key role in overall management including developing co-ordination with all concerned stakeholders, oversee implementation of project activities and supervising project team.

Katherine is the ALIVE country lead for South Africa and is particuarly involved in Work Package 3 (intervention development) and Work Package 5 (Pilot RCT). Katherine is the Co-Director of the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health at the University of Cape Town. For more than 15 years her work has focused on improving access to and the quality of care for people living with mental disorders, developing and adapting evidence-based interventions for use in low and middle income countries, and integrating evidence-based mental health services into health systems with a focus on task sharing. She is committed to developing innovative approaches to ensuring access to mental health services to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who often feel excluded or unwelcome in clinical settings. Examples of her research include piloting a brief interventions for adolescents based on problem solving therapy, piloting the use of digital technologies to engage young people via mobile phone technology, and a project focused on using skateboarding as a space for youth mental health interventions and engagement.

Graham is a Collaborator on ALIVE, and will support the design of the pilot trial. Graham is Professor of Community Psychiatry at the Centre for Global Mental Health and the Centre for Implementation Science, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. He is also a Consultant Psychiatrist at South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, working in a community mental health team in Lambeth. Graham has made significant contributions to the development of mental health policy in England, and is also active in global mental health. He now chairs the Guideline Development Group for the WHO guidelines on mental health at work. He is a Board Trustee of United for Global Mental Health, a Board Member for Mental Health and Human Rights, and he chairs the Board of Implemental (Maudsley International). His areas of research expertise include: reduction of stigma and discrimination, evaluation of mental health services, and global mental health.

Wietse is an ALIVE collaborator, leading the realist synthesis, which forms part of Work Package 2 (Theoretical model development). Wietse is Professor of Global Mental Health at the Section of Global Health, Department of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen; Professor by Special Appointment of Global Mental Health and Social Justice at the VU University Amsterdam; Adjunct Professor at the Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Senior Technical Advisor with HealthRight International. He holds an MA in Clinical and Health Psychology (Leiden University), a PhD in Public Mental Health (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. His research and practice focus on mental health and psychosocial support interventions for adversity-affected populations in low- and middle-income countries. In particular, his work centers on (integrated) interventions that address mental health and the social determinants of mental health, and he is very interested in understanding how research can lead to improved practice (and vice versa).

Daniela supports the ALIVE project implementation in Colombia as an IPA Senior Research Associate. Before joining IPA, she was the advisor to the Minister of Health of Colombia, where she supervised the follow-up of institutional projects. She served as an advisor and implementer of policy outlines related to citizen participation, peace construction, and institutional strengthening at the Colombian Civil Service Department. She was the advisor to the Director of the Oversight Office of Bogotá to prevent corruption in the execution of the city's Land Management Plan. Daniela worked as a research assistant at the Berlin Social Science Centre on a project to evaluate new citizen participation practices evolving in Latin America. She has conducted research in the fields of education, socio-emotional development, and peaceful relationships among children from vulnerable communities. Daniela holds an MPA from LSE and an MPP from the Hertie School of Governance. Previously, she received a BA in Psychology and a BSc in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de los Andes.

Nicci is the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Director at Waves for Change, one of ALIVE’s implementation partners in South Africa. Nicci holds a Masters degree in Programme Evaluation (University of Cape Town). She has 10 years’ quantitative and qualitative research experience in the development sector, which includes programme monitoring, evaluation and learning experience. Her Criminology and Psychology background coupled with her work experience have refined her passion for and understanding of the necessary requirements when working with children and youth from volatile backgrounds and their specialised needs. Nicci is driven to contribute to furthering development initiatives, ensuring that they are adequately designed, effectively planned and executed, and thoroughly evaluated, contributing to the successful achievement of the envisaged impact. She believes that this is critical when duplicating similar initiatives based on the “so what” question and supported by sound empirical research; which she believes, cannot be done without understanding and recognising young people’s needs, their behaviour, the dreams and desires and overcoming their worst fears.

Shabab is supporting the coordination of Work Package 4 on instrument development and validation. Shabab is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Health, at Georgetown University, School of Nursing and Health Studies. Shabab is a mixed methods researcher with expertise in developing and testing culturally sensitive, safe, and effective community-based interventions for mental illness in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). His current work is examining the association between climate-change-related stressors and adverse mental health outcomes in Bangladesh. He also leads multi-site projects conducting anthropological research into the culturally salient explanatory models and idioms of distress connected to depression and mental illness stigma across several LMIC settings. Shabab received his Doctor of Public Health and Master of Public Health degrees from the Milken Institute School of Public Health, at George Washington University, Washington DC.

Paula is the Global Development Director at Waves for Change, one of ALIVE’s implementation partners in South Africa. Paula holds a degree in Sport and Exercise Science and a Bachelor of Laws, specialising in children’s rights. She has 10 years of experience living and working with grassroots Non-Governmental Organisations in Eastern and Southern Africa, as well as South East Asia. Based in Cape Town, Paula specialises in supporting organisations to establish skills and systems to comply with international standards in financial stewardship; monitoring, evaluation and learning and child protection and safeguarding. She supports the design and continuous evaluation of grassroots development programmes in partnership with children and young people, and embeds learning to continuously improve programmes.

Professor of Global Health and Economics, Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University.

Associate Professor of Global Mental Health
Vice Chair for Education
Department of Mental Health
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Professor of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, UK
Chair of the Royal Society of Biology Education and Science Policy Committee
Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, the British Academy and the American Association of Psychological Science

Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Scineces (Department of Global Health)
Executive Director at I-TECH
Director at University of Washington Global Mental Health
Associate Director at University of Washington Behavioral Research Center for HIV (BIRCH)

Professor of Clinical Psychology, Department of Clinical, Neuro and Developmental Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Director, WHO Collaborating Centre For Research and Dissemination of Psychological Interventions, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Visiting Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Turku, Finland

Clinical Psychologist and Senior lecturer, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Red Cross Children’s Hospital, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town

Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh
Research Scientist, Learning Research & Development Center

Senior Mental Health Technical Advisor, Programme Division Director’s Office, UNICEF HQ, New York

John L Loeb & Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Social Epidemiology
Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Lead Economist & Research Manager, Development Research Group, The World Bank

The Pershing Square Professor of Global Health and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in the Blavatnik Institute’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Co-founder and Member of Managing Committee, Sangath, Goa, India”.

Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine, University of Montréal
Scientist, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Sainte-Justine, University of Montréal

Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Oxford
Fellow of Linacre College Oxford
Honorary Professor in the School of Public Health, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Adjunct Member African Health Research Institute
Honorary Consultant in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry: Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust

Senior Investigator, NIMH
Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Georgetown University
Consultant psychiatrist at the National and Specialist Mood Disorder Clinic, Maudsley, UK

Professor and Chief, Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, USA