Dévora Kestel

Director, Mental Health, Brain Health and Substance Use – WHO

Dévora Kestel is a senior global mental health policy expert with over 30 years of international experience across Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. She has led and advised national mental health reform efforts, with a strong focus on community-based systems and human rights.

She holds degrees in Psychology (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina) and Public Health (LSHTM, UK). Her career includes work in Trieste, Italy; post-war Kosovo and Albania (as WHO Representative); and technical leadership at PAHO in the Caribbean and Washington, DC. Since 2019, she has served as Director of Mental Health, Brain Health and Substance Use at WHO.

Professor Hanna Kienzler

Professor of Global Health, King’s College London
Co-Director, ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health

Professor Hanna Kienzler is a medical anthropologist whose research focuses on mental health in contexts of systemic violence, ethnic conflict, and humanitarian crises. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Kosovo, Palestine, and the MENA region.

She leads two major international projects on mental health and justice (Wellcome Trust) and health in conflict (GCRF), and previously held academic positions at McGill University. Her work combines ethnography with global health policy analysis, with a particular focus on lived experience, trauma, and social suffering.

Dr Cristian Montenegro

Principal Investigator, Transitions Project
Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Global Health & Social Medicine, KCL

Cristian Montenegro is a medical sociologist and global health scholar whose work explores the role of service-user knowledge and the intellectual contributions of the Global South to mental health policy. He was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and Assistant Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research spans participatory mental health, critical global health, and mental health systems reform in the global south.

Dr Felipe Szabzon

Postdoctoral Researcher, Transitions Project (Brazil)
Researcher at CEBRAP and CULTMIND (University of Copenhagen)

Felipe Szabzon is a psychologist and interdisciplinary researcher with a PhD in Health and Welfare Dynamics (NOVA/EHESS). He is affiliated with the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) and the Institute of Psychiatry, University of São Paulo.

His work focuses on mental health systems, psychiatric reform, and the politics of care in Latin America. Felipe combines policy analysis with ethnographic research to explore state practices, citizenship, and institutional change.

Dr Sofía Bowen

Postdoctoral Researcher, Transitions Project (Chile)

Sofía Bowen is a medical anthropologist with a PhD from King’s College London. She has conducted fieldwork on mental and occupational health in Chile, focusing on the lived experience of distress, medico-bureaucratic power, and institutional responses to harm.

She has taught anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and worked in interdisciplinary teams on public health. Her work examines how suffering is recognised and contested within psychiatric and bureaucratic systems.

Dr Dörte Bemme

Dr Dörte Bemme is a Lecturer in Society and Mental Health at King's. Before joining, she was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the New School for Social Science Research, New York.

Dörte’s research interests include the history and anthropology of psychiatry, the globalization and digitalization of mental health care through Global Mental Health, and the production of expert knowledge in interdisciplinary collaborations. Her long-term, multi-sited fieldwork among Global Mental Health actors in international institutions, global academic consortia, virtual and project sites in South Africa and Nepal explores how mental health is experienced, performed and construed at different scales. She has an interest in the production of global knowledge and how cultural, socio-economic and epistemological differences are reconciled. She now studies the use of digital technologies in psychiatry and contributes to the development of neuroecosocial concepts and methods.