Amina Abubakar

I am an Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Health at Pwani University, Kenya and a Research Fellow at the Kenya Medical Research Institute/Wellcome Trust Research Programme. I  co-lead the Neuroscience research group at KEMRI-WTRP a dynamic multidisciplinary research group interested in child and adolescent well-being. I am also an honorary fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK.  I have developed, in collaboration with colleagues, measures of early child development for use in Low and Middle-Income Countries which are currently in use in several African countries. In 2016, I won the Royal Society Pfizer Award in recognition of my pioneering psychological research in East Africa, and for the impact our work has had in the field of neurodevelopmental assessment. My substantive work has focused on the adverse impacts of a range of health conditions on young people’s neurocognition and mental health. In 2016, I was awarded the MRC/DfID, African Research Leaders award to investigate the associations between executive functioning and mental health, medical adherence,  risk taking behaviour and scholastic outcomes among adolescents in the context of HIV.