Affiliation: UCL Institute for Global Health, UK

Keywords: Community, Health Psychology, Participation and engagement, Power, Mental health, Non-Communicable Diseases, Multi-Morbidity, Political Economy, Racism, Global Health, Public Health, Social Change, Southern Africa, Colombia, United Kingdom

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Dr. Rochelle Burgess is a leading community health psychologist who specialises in community-based approaches to health. Her work studies the social and psychological dynamics of health using qualitative, participatory, and transformative methodologies.

She is interested in the promotion of community approaches to health globally, and views communities as a route to understanding and responding to the political economy of poor health, with a particular emphasis on the impacts of broader development issues such as power, poverty, gender, systems of governance, and community mobilisation (civil society). For the past decade she has focused largely on mental wellbeing and common mental disorders and is a leading voice in the emerging field of social interventions in Global Mental Health. She has led a range of projects that focus on the development of community mental health interventions (in South Africa, Colombia, UK and Zimbabwe) and has contributed her methodological and mental health expertise to projects on community led responses to other health challenges, such as child health in Nigeria. Following the COVID-19 outbreak, she has written extensively to advocate for community oriented and locally driven responses to the pandemic, leading pieces in The Lancet and Nature.

She is a Lecturer in Global Health and Deputy Director of the UCL Centre for Global Non-Communicable Diseases, at the Institute for Global Health at UCL. She holds a BSc(hons) in Psychology from McMaster University, an MSc and PhD in Health, Community and Development from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences in the UK. She is the founder and Director of UCL’s Global Network on Mental Health and Child Marriage.   She has held visiting fellowships at LSE Centre for Africa, University of KwaZulu Natal, and is a Research Associate at University of Johannesburg. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health, member of the ESRC peer review college, the UK Trauma Council, among other affiliations.