Dr. Rochelle Burgess

Rochelle is Professor of Global Mental Health and Social Justice and Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Global Non-Communicable Diseases, at the Institute for Global Health at UCL. She is a scholar-activist committed to transforming the academy into a space for the promotion of a more just and equitable world. She is the Founder and Director of UCL’s Global Network on Mental Health and Child Marriage. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health, Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe, member of the ESRC peer review college, and UK Trauma Council, among other international affiliations and advisory board memberships.

Her interests lie in the advancement of community-led approaches to health and mental health improvement globally. Her work explores how communities navigate and respond to the political economy of poor health, with a particular emphasis on community-led efforts to address the impacts of broader development issues such as poverty, gender and racialisation. For the past decade, she has focused on these issues in relation to mental ill-health and wellbeing and the experience of common mental disorders in contexts of adversity. She is a community health psychologist and qualitative social scientist, trained at the London School of Economics and Political sciences.

A globally recognised voice in community and social approaches to Global Mental Health, Rochelle has led a range of projects that focus on the development and evaluation of community mental health interventions (in South Africa, Colombia, UK and Zimbabwe). She has also contributed her methodological and mental health expertise to projects on community led responses to other health challenges, such as child health in Nigeria and Patient Centred outcomes for TB. She has also been an advisor to the WHO on mental health policy.