Dr Ahmed Waqas MBBS, PhD

Personal Statement

I am a public mental health physician with an interest in public and digital mental health. My work in public mental health is focused on four interlinked work streams, which translate nicely into applied clinical and population health settings:

i) Understanding the epidemiology and nature of common mental disorders
ii) Development of pragmatic and innovative (digital and task-shared) solutions to improve maternal mental health and child development in low-resourced settings.
iii) Interlinking above two streams to develop effective and personalized mental health approaches especially for perinatal women
iv) Evidence synthesis (using pairwise, network and individual participant data meta-analysis approaches) to synthesize research evidence on mental health.

I believe that equitable access to mental healthcare is one of the effective ways to bring about sustainable health and economic improvement in deprived communities. And there is a dire need to develop easily accessible and clinically effective mental health interventions across the spectrum of population health (promotion, prevention, and treatment). In this context, I am very interested in developing lay health workforces facilitated with technologies to ease training and intervention delivery in developing countries. I recently developed a software application for delivering personalized mental healthcare in low-resource settings.

Over the years, I have assisted several global health think tanks such as the World Health Organization in Geneva and EMR region, to help inform their health policies on perinatal mental health. My recent achievements include leading/co-leading evidence synthesis for the World Health Organization Guideline Development Groups on the prevalence, screening, prevention, and treatment of maternal mental disorders.

My research work so far, has gained good policy traction and international recognition. I have also been recognized as a top expert on perinatal depression in Asia by "expertscape" and Dr. Paramjit Toor Joshi Research Scholar at the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatrists in the US. Furthermore, I have published over 100 peer-reviewed publications in high-impact journals which have been cited over 2000 times (h-index: 24).