Ibrahim Kasujja joined King’s College London in 2023 as a King’s Africa International Scholarship recipient. He is a trained nutritionist and a mechanistic developmental scientist whose research examines the intersection of food insecurity, child mental health, and learning in resource-limited settings of Masaka District, Uganda, grounded in developmental psychopathology with an emerging interest in biological mechanisms linking hunger-related stress to emotional–behavioural regulation and cognitive development.

His PhD investigates the psychosocial mechanisms connecting food insecurity and child mental health through social causation, social drift, and bidirectional pathways, integrating food insecurity, nutrition science, developmental psychopathology, and global mental health. He has pioneered the development of a school-based food insecurity and hunger measure for use in resource-limited settings, enabling more precise identification of children most in need and improving the targeting of school feeding programmes. He also aims to further investigate the biological mechanisms through which hunger-related stress influences children’s emotional–behavioural states, with downstream impacts on cognitive development and learning trajectories. His methodological approach combines child-centred qualitative methods with longitudinal and multilevel analyses to identify mechanisms operating across biological, psychological, and social levels.

Alongside his academic work, Ibrahim is the founder and CEO of Nurture Posterity International, a social enterprise improving school nutrition and farmer livelihoods in Uganda through fortified composite flours and regenerative value chains. NutriPosh has reached over 240,000 children and received international recognition, including the IFT Seeding the Future Global Food System Growth Grant.

Ibrahim holds a BSc in Human Nutrition (Kyambogo University) and an MSc in Human Nutrition (McGill University, Canada). His work bridges nutrition, developmental science, and social policy to inform integrated school-based interventions.

Research interests

• Food insecurity and hunger
• Child and adolescent mental health
• Developmental psychopathology
• Nutrition and child development
• Cognitive development and learning outcomes
• School feeding and nutrition-education interventions
• Global mental health in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)

Expertise and public engagement

• Works with the Statistics Division (ESS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on food insecurity data, contributing to monitoring progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger)
• Collaborates with partners including the Mastercard Foundation, Institute of Food Technologists, and the Seeding the Future Foundation, on the scaling of school-based nutrition initiatives in Uganda
• Engages with international and development organisations to support evidence-informed approaches to school feeding, nutrition, and child development