Aemal Akhtar is a psychiatric epidemiologist working at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He obtained his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Vrije Universitet Amsterdam in 2022. Dr. Akhtar’s research has primarily focused on the effectiveness of potentially scalable psychological interventions for adolescents and adult refugees residing in low-resourced settings. More recently, his research explores the feasibility of implementing task-sharing interventions in high-income settings, and how they can be implemented complementarily alongside health systems.
Alongside his academic research, Dr. Akhtar has been a consultant at WHO since 2021. In this role, he contributed to the development of the Mental Health at Work and Mental Health Gap Action Programme guidelines, and the development of a novel conversational agent psychological intervention for youth. Most recently, he is collaborating alongside the WHO-Columbia Collaboration Centre for Global Mental Health Research on the development and preliminary field testing of the Flexible Interview for ICD-11 (FLII-11), with the aim of preparing the FLII-11 for future use as a national epidemiological tool to collect country level mental health data.