Gayan joined King’s College London as an undergraduate student in 1997. After working in the Public Health field at Primary Care Trusts. NHS England and local authority, he rejoined the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London, in 2008 as a PhD student to investigate health outcomes and treatment responses in dementia, including response to acetylcholinesterase inhibitors.

His areas of expertise include public health intelligence, evaluation of public health interventions, conducting epidemiological studies using large electronic health records, health service research and evaluation of mental health laws.

He completed an MPH in Public Health in 2006 and an MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2008. Furthermore, he was interested in medical law and completed an LLM in Medical Law and Ethics at the University of Law. He also learnt management and administration by completing an MBA at Queen Mary University of London and Masters in Public Administration & Management at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. He also completed an MA in Evaluation at Saarland University, Germany.

Research Interests

After completing his PhD, he joined the Psychological Medicine Department as an Epidemiologist. He has gone on to develop epidemiological methodology to investigate cognitive response to centrally acting ACE inhibitors and trazodone among patients with dementia using real-life observational data. He also worked on large international research databases. He worked in the pharmaceutical industry at Roche Products Ltd in the EMIF-AD project, which established a pan-European platform for large-scale research on biomarkers and risk factors for neurodegenerative disorders. He expanded his interest in epidemiology, working on mental health data linked to other data sources, such as cancer and primary care records, and has investigated associations between physical health and mental health problems. By working with the physical health and mental health interface, he gained experience in the preventative elements in public health, and he was interested in how wider determinants of health, such as loneliness and non-employment, affect mental health. To do this, he used local mental health data as well as nationally representative surveys such as the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he investigated the impact of the pandemic on older people's mental health services. Furthermore, he investigated antidepressant drug prescriptions and the incidence of COVID-19 in mental health. He has experience in leading research into inequalities and has led a multi-professional research group looking at surgical outcomes among patients with mental health problems and investigated outcomes after vascular surgery, bariatric surgery and cardiac surgeries. He has a growing portfolio of mental health law research and has particularly focused on community treatment orders and the Mental Health Act 1983, affecting patient outcomes.

Dr Gayan Perera is an experienced epidemiologist with research interests in mental health, primary care, public health, clinical informatics, medical law, and health service evaluation.

Research Groups

CVD-COVID-UK / COVID-IMPACT Consortium

BHF Data Science COVID-IMPACT Mental Health special interest group

Teaching 

He teaches Helathcare Public Health, Epidemiology, systematic reviews, Healthcare evaluation,  in undergraduate and postgraduate public health at Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine at King's College London and mental health programmes at the IOPPN.  He is a module leader on the Systematics reviews module in MSc Mental Health Studies at the IOPPN and Healthcare Public Health module on the MSc Public Health programme at the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine. He teaches on the Big Data module in the Mental Health Studies programme at the IOPPN. He is a PhD supervisor as well as an MSc dissertation supervisor and is a member of the Psychological Medicine PhD sub-committee at King's College London.  

Expertise and Public Engagement 

Gayan conducts public health informatics seminars for the London deanery Public Health trainees.  He also led seminars for students in the Centre for Research, Development and Innovation, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. He has conducted lectures on the use of Natural Language Process (NLP) in Psychiatry for MSc in Clinical Trials students at the University of Oxford. He has contributed to several director of public health annual reports in Westminster and Enfield. Gayan was a chapter author in the Annual Report of the Chief Medical Officer for England 2015.

Personal life

Gayan is a keen cricketer and plays for his village cricket team in Radlett, Hertfordshire.