Dr. Pamela Y. Collins
Dr. Pamela Y. Collins is the director of the Office for Research on Disparities & Global Mental Health and the Office of Rural Mental Health Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Prior to joining NIMH, she was a professor in the departments of epidemiology and psychiatry at Columbia University where she conducted research on the mental health aspects of the AIDS epidemic, and through her research, worked to improve access to HIV prevention for people with severe mental illness as well as access to mental health care services for people with HIV domestically and internationally.
Dr. Collins’s research has focused on the HIV prevention needs of ethnic minority women with severe mental illness and the contribution of social stigma related to mental illness and ethnicity to women’s HIV risk in the United States. Internationally, she has conducted and evaluated training of healthcare providers in mental health, HIV/AIDS transmission, prevention, and counseling in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. With colleagues at NIMH, Dr. Collins directs the NIMH Collaborative Hubs for International Research on Mental Health. She was one of the editors of the 2011 Lancet series on Global Mental Health, she is a leader of the Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health initiative, and recently led the development of the 2013 PLoS Medicine Policy Forum series on global perspectives for integrating mental health.