Presenter Biographies

Mohammed Abdulaziz

Dr. Mohammed Abdulaziz is the Head of Division, Disease control and Prevention, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is a medical doctor and has a master’s in public health. He is a fellow of the West African College of Physician and rose to the rank of Chief Consultant Physician before Joining Africa CDC. He is one of the foundation senior epidemiologists who started the operationalization of Africa CDC in 2016 and had previously served as the Principal Medical Epidemiologist where he was the program coordinator for Africa CDC’s first regional initiative to strengthen public Health in Africa. He is a fellow of the Chatham House Africa Leadership Program in public Health. He has led the development and validation of the Africa CDC strategy on NCD, Injuries and Mental Health and that of the Reproductive health which are currently been implemented to support African Union member states. During the COVID-19 pandemic response he co-chaired the Infection Prevention and Control Technical Working Group for Africa CDC continental response to COVID-19. He is the coordinator of the Country engagement workstream of the Africa CDC SLL program. Dr Mohammed has over 40 publications in peer review journals.

Mohamed Ibrahim

Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia School of Social Work and a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar. He is an affiliated research investigator with Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and a past Clinical Addiction Fellow at the British Columbia Center on Substance Use. Dr. Mohamed’s areas of research focus on global mental health, addiction, mental health and psychosocial support and peacebuilding, task-shifting/sharing in lower- and middle-income (LMIC) settings. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in health and addiction. His health leadership and clinical work covers over 20 years in East Africa including working in the Kenya public health care system, refugee and internally displaced settings in Somalia, Kenya and Uganda. Dr. Mohamed also has extensive clinical experience in the mental health and addiction sector in Canada and United States of America.

André Janse van Rensburg

André J van Rensburg is a social scientist and Associate Professor of Health Systems Research at the Centre for Rural Health, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. His principal area of expertise lies in the integrative strengthening of public mental health systems in low-resource settings, particularly through processes of co-development and collaborative learning. His current research includes the development and testing of a multilevel model of transitional psychosocial care and support for people living with severe mental distress (National Institute for Mental Health), and the testing of a person-centred model of care for people living with chronic multimorbid conditions in primary healthcare settings (National Institute for Health and Care Research). He is a nationally rated researcher, serves on various provincial and national health policy committees, serves on global health funding review committees for the Wellcome Trust and the National Institute for Health and Care Research, and is an editorial board member of Global Mental Health.  

Brittney Dudar

Brittney Dudar is a Portfolio Manager on Grand Challenges Canada’s Global Mental Health team, where she is responsible for leading the Sub-Saharan Africa cluster of investments for the Being Initiative — an international mental health initiative working with young people to improve their mental health and wellbeing through research, innovation, and ecosystem building in 12 priority countries. Brittney has over a decade of experience supporting innovators to scale early-stage technologies and global health products and services, and is passionate about supporting social innovators working on global health challenges to access the capital and supports they need to scale locally-developed solutions to local problems.

Jura Augustinavicius

Jura Augustinavicius is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Equity, Ethics, and Policy at the School of Population and Global Health at McGill University. She is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. At McGill University she is a member of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Mental Health and an Associate Director of the Centre on Climate Change and Health. She regularly provides technical support to governments, NGOs, and UN agencies on mental health and psychosocial support in humanitarian crises and in the context of climate change. Prof. Augustinavicius’ research has a strong program implementation and evaluation focus. She currently leads several research projects that bring together teams with interdisciplinary and intersectoral expertise to co-design interventions with communities most heavily impacted by climate change and other crises.

Kenneth Miller

Ken Miller is the Edith Lando Professor of Counselling for Refugee and Immigrant Youth and Families at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His work is focused on understanding and addressing the mental health needs of conflict-affected populations. He has published extensively on the various pathways by which war impacts mental health and has a particular interest in parental wellbeing and parenting in war-affected families. Together with teams in Lebanon and Gaza, he recently led the development and evaluation of the Caregiver Support Intervention (CSI), a nine-session mindfulness-based group intervention aimed at lowering stress and distress in conflict-affected parents. Dr. Miller is the co-editor of The Mental Health of Refugees and the author of War Torn: Stories of Courage, Love, and Resilience. His blog The Refugee Experience can be found on PsychologyToday.com.

Mark van Ommeren

Dr. Mark van Ommeren is Head of the Mental Health Unit at WHO headquarters. Much of his early work focused on inter-agency humanitarian policy and supporting countries to build back better mental health systems after emergencies. To improve intersectoral collaboration he introduced the now popular term “mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS)” into humanitarian policy. He coordinated the writing of WHO's (2022) World Mental Health Report. He leads a WHO team that covers many aspects of mental health, including suicide prevention; mental health at work; services reorganization; integrated care; workforce development; psychosocial, pharmaceutical and digital interventions; MHPSS emergency preparedness, response and recovery; child and adolescent mental health; and epidemiology.

Jana Davidson

Dr. Jana Davidson was the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), BC Children’s Hospital, and BC Women’s Hospital + Health Centre.

She had the privilege of growing up as an uninvited white settler in Treaty Eight Territory in the traditional and ancestral lands of the Dunne-za First Nations in the community of Fort St. John, BC. She is a daughter, sister, spouse and mother and grateful to reside now as an uninvited white settler in the ancestral and traditional lands of the Tsawwassen First Nation.

She held the position of CMO at Children’s and Women’s from January 2020 – December 2024. In her role as CMO, she had the privilege of overseeing both hospitals’ related research institutes: BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute and the Women’s Hospital Research Institute. Prior to this she was Chief of Psychiatry at BC Children’s Hospital and Division Head for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at UBC (2008-2020).

Jana is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia (UBC). She works clinically with several northern communities via tele-psychiatry and with the Tsawwassen First Nation. She completed her medical training and psychiatry residency at the University of BC and her child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship training at BC Children’s Hospital and the Early Psychosis Intervention Program in Melbourne, Australia.

Jana is a passionate ally in the work of eliminating Indigenous specific racism from health care in BC and in embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion to improve health outcomes, and to inform research as well as it’s translation. She received the Champion of Change Award from the Doctor’s of BC in 2018.

Mohamed Ibrahim

Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia School of Social Work and a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar. He is an affiliated research investigator with Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute and a past Clinical Addiction Fellow at the British Columbia Center on Substance Use. Dr. Mohamed’s areas of research focus on global mental health, addiction, mental health and psychosocial support and peacebuilding, task-shifting/sharing in lower- and middle-income (LMIC) settings. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in health and addiction. His health leadership and clinical work covers over 20 years in East Africa including working in the Kenya public health care system, refugee and internally displaced settings in Somalia, Kenya and Uganda. Dr. Mohamed also has extensive clinical experience in the mental health and addiction sector in Canada and United States of America.

Katharine Thomson

Dr. Katharine Thomson is the Head of Psychology at BC Children’s and Women’s Hospital where she supports both psychologists and interdisciplinary teams across the campus. Dr. Thomson received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology and completed a postgraduate fellowship in medical psychology at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Previous to her current role, Dr Thomson worked with the Compass Team in Healthy Minds to build capacity and access to mental health care across the province. Dr Thomson is passionate about medical psychology, interdisciplinary consultation and teaching, and LGBTQ+ health equity. Kate identifies as a queer cisgender woman with White settler roots who is not living with a disability, and humbly recognizes the many privileges those identities have afforded her. Kate was born in Calgary and moved around the world throughout her childhood and adult life; she is very grateful to have landed as an uninvited settler in the beautiful Musqueam lands with her wife and two young children.