Norman Sartorius, M.D., M.A., D.P.M., Ph.D., FRC. Psych.

PROF. AHMED OKASHA,MD, PhD, FRCP, FRCPsych, FACP(Hon.)

Mario Maj is Full Professor of Psychiatry and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Naples.

Since 1983, he has been collaborating with the World Health Organization (WHO), being active as a researcher and an educator in sub-Saharan Africa, South-East Asia and Latin America. From 1989 to 1991, he has been responsible of the WHO Programme on the Neuropsychiatric Aspects of HIV Infection at WHO Headquarters in Geneva.

He is President of the World Psychiatric Association. He has been President of the European Psychiatric Association (2003-2004) and of the Italian Psychiatric Association (2000-2002). He is member of the Italian High Council of Medicine and Consultant for Mental Health to the Italian Minister of Health.

He is member of the DSM-V Workgroup for Mood Disorders and of the Steering Committee for the Chapter on Mental Disorders of the ICD-11. He is editor of World Psychiatry and member of the editorial board of several international psychiatric journals.

He has published papers in 51 different journals indexed in the Current Contents, including all the psychiatric journals indexed in the Current Contents-Life Sciences, and several major journals in the field of neurosciences, basic sciences and general medicine.

According to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), he is the Italian psychiatrist with the highest number of citations in the period 1981-2007.

Current:

• Professor of Social Psychiatry at Maastricht University, the Netherlands
• Head: Center for Public Mental Health (CPMH), Maastricht University
• Founder: Mind Venture International Institute and the Mind Channel

Past:

• Founder: Int. Inst. Psycho-social and Socio-ecological Research,  IPSER (1985-2001)
• President and Secretary. General, World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH)
• Co-Chair of the Int. Business Roundtable on Mental Health and Addiction

Prof. deVries was educated in biology, medicine, psychiatry and anthropology at the Harvard and the University of Rochester.  He has held faculty positions at Maastricht, Harvard Medical School, and the Universities of Nairobi, Bielefeld and Rochester in medical and social science departments. Following cross-cultural fieldwork on child development and medical anthropology in East Africa in 1974, he has continued to be active internationally as well as in clinical psychiatry.  deVries has been particularly interested in the experience of mental illness and human development and the interaction of individual and group behavior within social cultural contexts.  To investigate these he has developed the Experience Sampling Method in psychiatry and set up IPSER institute and the Center for Public Mental Health to carry out applied interdisciplinary psychosocial field research and interventions under a variety of human conditions.

Vikram Patel is a Professor of International Mental Health and Welcome Trust Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (UK), the first academic institution to win the Gates Award for Global Health in 2009. He is the Joint Director of the School’s Centre for Global Mental Health (www.centreforglobalmentalhealth.org). He holds honorary Professorial appointments with the Public Health Foundation of India, the Institute of Psychiatry (UK), Dalhousie University (Canada) and the University of Melbourne (Australia). He serves on a number of advisory committees including the WHO’s Expert Advisory Group for Mental Health and the Guideline Development Group for mhGAP; advisory boards of the Institute of Health Metrics & Evaluation (USA), the Centre for Chronic Diseases Control (India) and the George Institute of International Health (Australia); and the Publications Committee of the World Psychiatric Association. He serves on the boards of two community based NGOs in India, including Sangath, a mental health NGO (www.sangath.com) which he founded and which won the MacArthur Foundation’s International Prize for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2008. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals including PLoS Medicine, British Journal of Psychiatry, the International Journal of Epidemiology and World Psychiatry. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the UK. He has won many awards including the Rhodes Scholarship, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for Leadership Development, Wellcome Trust fellowships and, in 2009, the Chalmers Medal from the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine & Hygiene. His book Where There Is No Psychiatrist (Gaskell, 2003) has become a widely used manual for community mental health in developing countries. He was an editor of the Lancet Series on Global Mental Health (2007) and is an editor of the PLoS Medicine series on packages of care for mental and neurological disorders in developing countries (2009) and the Lancet Series on Universal Health Care in India (due in 2010). He led the efforts to set up the Movement for Global Mental Health which was launched on October 10^th, 2008 (www.globalmentalhealth.org). He is based in Goa, India where he leads a program of public health research and capacity development with Sangath and other partners focusing on three broad areas: child development, adolescent health and mental health.

• Professor of Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine Ain Shams University.
• Visiting Professor of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Misr University for Science and Technology, 6^th of October City
• Visiting Professor of Psychiatry to Psychology Department Faculty of Arts, Cairo University and Ain Shams University.
• World Psychiatric Association (WPA) executive committee member
• World Psychiatric Association Secretary for Scientific Meetings
• Chairperson of the WPA Operational Committee on Scientific Meetings
• Executive Committee member of the Egyptian Psychiatric Association
• Executive Committee member of the Egyptian Society of Biological Psychiatry
• Founding Member & Executive Committee Member of the Egyptian Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Founding Member & Treasurer of the Egyptian Alzheimer Society.
• Member and honorary member of many international associations and organizations
• Executive member of the National Council for Mental Health in Egypt (MOH), director and Technical Advisor to MOH National Council Psychiatric Hospitals, and board member and examiner in the Egyptian Board for Psychiatry (MOH).
• Associate Editor of the Egyptian Journal of Psychiatry
• Associate Editor Current Psychiatry Journal
• Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Child Neuropsychiatry, Member of the editorial board of the British Journal of Psychiatry (Middle East Edition), Member of the Editorial board of Archives of General Psychiatry (Middle East Edition) and member of the editorial board of World Psychiatry Journal.
• Published more than 40 papers in national and international journals contributed in 14 national and international books and supervised more than 30 masters and doctorate degree thesis.

Dr. Marcelo E. Cruz is a highly regarded health science investigator in Ecuador.He organized the first epidemiologic studies of neurological disorders in Ecuador. His discovery of the frequency of epilepsy caused by neurocysticercosis, due to the invasion to the brain of the larval form of the pork tapeworm (T. solium taeniasis/cysticercosis) led to his organizing and funding mass de-worming programs, the first of which was carried out in 1990. The results have been amazingly successful. In the 1980’s, the prevalence of porcine cysticercosis in the slaughterhouses was around 20 %, and now the figure is 1 %. Previously, neurologists in Quito evaluated 1-3 cases of cysticercosis each week; now the same number of neurologists see only 2-3 cases per year.As a result of his research, the menace of parasitic diseases in general decreased significantly, and small scale pig raising in unsanitary conditions has been greatly reduced.

Ronald Kessler is a Professor of Health Care Policy at HarvardMedicalSchool. He received his PhD in Medical Sociology from NYU in 1975. He then did postdoctoral training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and the University of Wisconsin in psychiatric epidemiology before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1979. He remained on the faculty at Michigan for 17 years, where he became a Professor in the Department of Sociology and a Program Director in Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. He moved to his current position as Professor of Health Care Policy at HarvardMedicalSchool in 1997. Kessler’s research deals broadly with the social determinants of mental health and illness as studied from an epidemiological perspective. He is the author of over 500 publications and the recipient of many awards for his research, including Senior Scientist and MERIT awards from the National Institute of Mental Health. Kessler has been rated by the ISI as the most widely cited researcher in the field of psychiatry in the world for each of the last nine years. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and in 2008 was the first psychiatric epidemiologist ever elected to membership in the National Academies of Science. Kessler is the Principal Investigator of the U.S. National Comorbidity Survey, the first nationally representative survey of the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders in the US (www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/ncs)

Frederick W. Hickling, BSC (Anat.), MBBS, DM, MRCPsych(UK), FRSM, DFAPA was born in Jamaica, attended Wolmers Boys School on a Wolmers Foundation Scholarship (1954-1961), and educated in medicine and psychiatry at the University of the West Indies, Mona. He received specialist training in anatomy at St. Thomas’ Hospital Medical School, University of London, and postgraduate training in psychiatry at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, University of Edinburgh. Professor Hickling helped to establish a unique community psychiatric service and to pioneer cultural therapy in Jamaica in the 1970’s. In the 1980’s he established a private psychiatric research and clinical service in Kingston, and in the 1990’s he was instrumental in helping to shape policy for African Caribbean Mental Health in the United Kingdom. With wide international experience in the Caribbean, North America, the UK and New Zealand, he was Head, Section of Psychiatry, University of the West Indies Mona, from 2000 to 2006, and is presently Professor of Psychiatry, University of the West Indies, Mona, and Executive Director of the UWI Caribbean Institute of Mental health and Substance Abuse (CARIMENSA). His research interests are in African Caribbean mental health, schizophrenia, personality disorder, community psychiatry, psychotherapy, political psychology and cultural therapy. He has more than 100 articles and book chapters in peer reviewed journals and books. He is the author and editor of five books. He was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association in 2008. He is married to Dr. Hilary Robertson-Hickling PhD, and has three children, Deborah, Daniella and Akindele.

David Farabee, Ph.D. is professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles and a principal investigator at the Integrated Substance Abuse Programs (ISAP). From 2002-2005, he served as a member of the U.S. Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on HIV and STD Prevention for the Centers for Disease Control. Dr. Farabee has published in the areas of substance abuse, adult and juvenile crime, HIV/AIDS, and offender treatment, was co-editor of the books Treatment of Drug Offenders (2002; New York: Springer) and Treating Addicted Offenders: A Continuum of Effective Practices, Volumes I and II(2004, 2007; New York: Civic Research Institute), author of, Rethinking Rehabilitation: Why Can’t We Reform Our Criminals? (2005; Washington, D.C.: AEI Press), and is co-editor of the Offender Programs Report.