Bridging Gaps in Mental Health Care

His work has centered on mental health policy advocacy, the transition from emergency to development-oriented programming, and the integration of mental health and child protection services into Jordan's public health system, a country hosting one of the largest refugee populations in the world. 

He has led mobile mental health needs assessments for refugees in Jordan and contributed to the cultural adaptation and evaluation of scalable, low-intensity psychological interventions for Syrian refugees, building deep expertise in designing affordable, context-sensitive mental health tools for displaced populations.

She draws on 10 years of experience generating and translating scientific evidence into policy action, working with international organizations such as the OECD as well as civil society actors.  She is committed to delivering timely, policy-relevant insights during pivotal moments - such as the COVID-19 pandemic - while grounding her work in national contexts, as demonstrated by the 2025 nine-country roadshow she led to disseminate the regional flagship report, Pathways to Prosperity for Adolescent Girls. 

She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, a Master’s degree in Economics from the University Paris Dauphine, and a Master’s degree in Law from the École normale supérieure.

She has extensive experience working in countries affected by conflict and fragility, including Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya. Previously, she served as Executive Director of J-PAL South Asia and held academic positions at the University of Cape Town and the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne. 

She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

She has led randomized controlled trials in some of the most violent settings in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as in fragile and conflict-affected countries in Eastern Europe, South Asia, and South Saharan Africa, where her work addresses parental stress, social-emotional learning, and psychosocial support.

Her current portfolio includes several large-scale projects, including a tutoring program in Ukraine, supporting mental health among adolescents in Armenian schools, designing tech-driven parenting interventions for fragile contexts. She also serves as a core team member for the 2026 World Development Report on AI and Development. 

She holds a MS in Economics and PhD in Economics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. 

His engagement with mental health research spans over fifteen years, from early empirical work on prevalence and economic consequences across five developing countries to a synthesis of the conflict-induced mental health burden in the Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict. Alongside this, his work has consistently pushed at measurement in data-scarce environments, reflecting a sustained interest in finding scalable signals where conventional instruments fall short.

As Co-Director of the 2023 World Development Report on Migrants, Refugees, and Societies, he coordinated contributions from hundreds of academics and practitioners and managed collaborations with the ILO and UNHCR, gaining deep experience in how research reaches humanitarian and government actors at scale.

He holds a PhD in Economics from MIT, an MA from the Toulouse School of Economics, and a MS in Applied Mathematics and Physics from École Polytechnique. 

Her scholarly output spans HIV implementation science, allocative and technical efficiency, and AI for human development, with over 100 publications and more than 3,100 citations. A sustained thread across her career is leading complex, multi-country programs and translating research into practical, scalable interventions — experience she brings to BRIDGE-MH's effort to deploy AI-powered tools for mental health screening and care delivery at scale. Before joining the World Bank, she directed at a global management consulting firm, founded a health analytics start-up, and served as an M&E officer in Malawi's Ministry of Education, Science and Technology. 

She holds a BSc in Engineering, an MSc in Functional Medicine, and an MA in Public Health and Development, with additional postgraduate training in digital health policy, data science, and epidemiological modeling.

More recently, her work has expanded into mental health in fragile settings: she is currently leading or co-leading several projects at the intersection of mental health and displacement, including a study on stress among women entrepreneurs in Addis Ababa, an evaluation of government versus NGO delivery of frontline mental health services in Ethiopia. 

She holds an MA in Applied Trade Policy Analysis and a BA in Economics from Addis Ababa University, an MSc in Globalization and Development from the University of Antwerp, and is a PhD candidate in Development Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

She leads several WB projects supporting the implementation of social protection and employment programs in Africa, Europe, and Central Asia. Maddalena holds a PhD in Economics from Bocconi University and a M.Sc. from Pompeu Fabra University.

A central thread of her work is understanding how societies rebuild trust and navigate reconciliation after violent conflict, including attitudes toward the reintegration of combatants and collaborators. She has deep expertise in survey-based and experimental research in fragile and conflict-affected settings, including work with refugee and host-community populations in Jordan, Turkey, and Sweden, and has contributed policy analysis to the World Bank, the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, and Freedom House. 

She is affiliated with J-PAL, EGAP, the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN), and the Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in Political Science from UCLA.

His research focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of mental health and psychosocial care systems in low-income and humanitarian settings, with particular attention to how violence, displacement, and poverty shape the wellbeing of individuals in sub-Saharan Africa. He has extensive experience working with refugee populations in Uganda, including Congolese refugees in northern and western Uganda, where he has led the translation, cultural adaptation, and piloting of psychosocial assessment instruments and community-based interventions such as sociotherapy and group interpersonal psychotherapy. 

He serves as Director of Innovations at StrongMinds Global, where he has contributed to scaling community-based depression treatment across Uganda and Zambia. His broader portfolio includes co-leading the WHO-UNICEF EQUIP initiative to train non-specialists in delivering psychological interventions. He is a member of the WHO Technical Advisory Group on Social Connection and President of the Uganda Clinical Psychology Association. He holds a PhD in Clinical Psychology from Makerere University.

Kessler is the principal investigator of the U.S. National Comorbidity Survey and several replications. He also leads the World Mental Health Survey Initiative, a series of comparative community epidemiological surveys examining the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders and their treatment across more than 30 countries worldwide. He also directs the Harvard site for Army STARRS-LS and the AURORA Study, and contributes to the Precision Treatment of Mental Disorders Initiative. 

Kessler earned his PhD in sociology from New York University and joined Harvard in 1994 after serving on the faculty at the University of Michigan.​

She brings strong skills in project management, data collection, and cross-institutional liaison — capacities she applies to BRIDGE-MH's operational coordination in Poland, one of the project's study countries. She holds a Master's degree in European Studies from Warsaw University.

His research focuses on post-traumatic stress disorder among humanitarian workers, religious communities, and youth and adults affected by armed conflict. He has extensive clinical and capacity-building experience across central and eastern Africa, having served as clinical psychologist, trainer, and supervisor at the Centre d'Écoute Psychosociale et Soins de Santé Mentale in Central African Republic, where he co-led the MHPSS Working Group, and at mental health centres in Goma and Lubumbashi in the DRC. He has also worked as a staff care consultant for Médecins du Monde and the International Rescue Committee. 

He holds a Master's degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Kisangani and a specialization in psychotraumatology and victimology from the École de Psychologie Clinique in Aix-en-Provence, France.

A central example of this applied work is Semillas de Apego, a group-based psychosocial program that promotes maternal health of primary caregivers in communities affected by conflict and displacement, which he directs. The program is currently being scaled across 15 municipalities to reach 12,000 caregivers throughout Colombia.

He serves as a Commissioner on the 2024/2025 Lancet Commission on Health, Conflict, and Forced Displacement, and is a member or affiliate of EGAP, J-PAL LAC, the Care and Protection of Children Learning Network, and the Internal Displacement Research Programme at the University of London. He was the 2021–2022 Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. 

He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis, and an MA and BA in Economics from Universidad de Los Andes. 

Elias Ndatabaye Maombi is a development economist with research interests in energy, forced displacement, disasters, natural resources, conflicts and social protection. He is a PhD candidate in Applied Economics at the University of Antwerp. Elias combines rigorous impact-evaluation methods with extensive, on-the-ground fieldwork across Estern DRC. A 2025 World Bank Group Africa Fellow and 2024 UNU-WIDER PhD fellow, Elias holds an M.Sc. in Development Evaluation and Management from the Institute of Development Policy and Management (Belgium) and an MA in Economics from the Université Catholique de Bukavu (DRC).

She has co-led a multi-country randomized controlled trial evaluating a self-help online stress-management program for Ukrainian refugees across 17 EU countries, and has contributed to large-scale experimental evaluations of digital education interventions in Ecuador and Vietnam, the latter incorporating social-emotional learning components. 

She holds an MSc in Economic Behavior and Governance from the University of Kassel and a BA in Economics from the University of Lviv.

A central example of this work is Proyecto CoVIDA, a large-scale epidemiological surveillance programme deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bogotá. The project combined symptom-based machine learning models with mass testing to characterise transmission dynamics and identify high-risk populations, directly informing public health decision-making under uncertainty. Findings were published in Nature Communications and The Lancet Regional Health. His current work extends these methods to road safety, housing discrimination, and agricultural innovation, including the use of audio recordings as experimental stimuli in rigorous field experiments.

He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Revista Desarrollo y Sociedad, Affiliated Faculty at the Center for Research and Formation in Artificial Intelligence at the Universidad de los Andes, and Country Affiliate for Colombia on the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA) of the CGIAR. He is a BITSS Catalyst at the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Data Science in Applied Microeconomics at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois, where he specialised in machine learning for applied economics.

He holds a PhD in Economics, an MS in Economics, and an MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a BA in Economics (with honours) from the National University of Tucumán, Argentina. 

Her core methodological expertise is in randomized controlled trials across a range of field settings. She has worked with field partners to implement and test app-based behavioral campaigns. She currently works on behavioral interventions to stimulate sustainable and healthy food behavior, as well as mental health solutions for conflict-affected populations. She has worked on multiple large EU-funded projects related to climate adaptation and mitigation behaviors, while also playing an active role in their coordination. 

She holds a PhD in Environmental and Behavioral Economics from Hasselt University, and a Double Degree Master in Sociology and Demography from Tilburg University and Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

At Kintsugi, he has led the creation of production machine learning models for mental health detection — including an open-source depression and anxiety model — and has collaborated with clinical, statistical, and regulatory teams on FDA trial design. Previously, he spent six years at Amazon Alexa as a Senior Applied Scientist working on voice-wake detection and online learning systems, and prior to that led audio source separation research at Analog Devices. 

He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

His work includes experimental and survey-based research on governance, humanitarian assistance, and the wellbeing of displaced populations, including a trial demonstrating that cash-like vouchers improve psychological wellbeing among conflict-displaced persons in eastern DRC. He brings extensive experience in rigorous research design in fragile, conflict-affected settings and a strong network of field infrastructure in the DRC, one of the project's study countries. 

He holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.

A psychiatrist and medical anthropologist by training, he has over 23 years of experience in humanitarian and development programming for mental health, spanning more than 75 field missions across 35 countries. He has been a key contributor to foundational clinical tools in global mental health, including the WHO mhGAP Humanitarian Intervention Guide, the UNHCR Operational Guidance for MHPSS, and the Sphere Standards on mental health and psychosocial distress. His research portfolio includes co-investigator or research team roles in 14 research consortia focused on scalable psychological interventions for refugees, with work among Syrian, South Sudanese, Congolese, and Rohingya refugee populations, and he has published over 90 peer-reviewed articles. 

He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam and an MD and MA in Cultural Anthropology from VU University Amsterdam.

His work focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and psychological distress among populations affected by armed conflict, natural disasters, and mass displacement in eastern DRC. He has extensive experience conducting field-based mental health assessments and implementing psychosocial care in collaboration with partners including the World Bank, MSF, International Medical Corps, the Panzi Foundation, and Heartland Alliance, among others. His clinical expertise spans cognitive-behavioral and systemic therapies as well as WHO Problem Management Plus, and he has contributed to integrating mental health into primary care across South and North Kivu. 

He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Kisangani.

Iman currently works, with Dr. Kristen Kao, on several projects related to migration and integration in MENA countries and Europe, as well as transitional justice in the MENA region, with a particular interest in mixed-methods approaches. Over the past four years, she has focused on facilitating large-N surveys, contributing to data analysis, literature reviews, and co-authoring work. She has also conducted multiple fieldwork projects in Jordan and Sweden, collecting large-scale survey data and conducting qualitative interviews.

Previously, Iman has seven years of experience working with NGOs in Geneva (Switzerland), focusing on the MENA region, human rights, refugees, and migration policy. During this time, she contributed to the development of policy reports on the integration of Syrian refugees in Sweden, Jordan, Lebanon, and other countries. She has held various roles, including field researcher and project coordinator.

At UNHCR Jordan, he has contributed to a range of research and analytical projects in collaboration with the World Bank, WFP, and academic partners. His work has included analyzing the determinants of refugee return using administrative and survey data, conducting poverty and vulnerability assessments, supporting refugee skills mapping exercises, and developing statistical tools for evidence-based policy analysis. He has also contributed to research on refugee mental health, using UNHCR’s Vulnerability Assessment Framework (VAF) data to examine patterns of psychological distress among refugee women and identify key socio-economic and demographic factors associated with mental health outcomes. Beyond project-specific analyses, Charlie has supported the dissemination of research findings through policy notes, reports, conference presentations, and collaborations with humanitarian and development partners.

He holds a BA in Economics and a BS in Environmental Science from Peking University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics at Tsinghua University. His research interests include forced displacement, poverty and welfare measurement , and the application of data science and artificial intelligence to development and humanitarian challenges.

Pim Cuijpers is Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Dissemination of Psychological Interventions. He is a global leader in research on the prevention and treatment of common mental disorders, with a focus on randomized controlled trials and meta-analyses. His work includes digital and scalable psychological interventions, particularly for depression and anxiety. He has published extensively and is consistently ranked among the world’s most highly cited researchers in psychiatry and psychology.