Dr Ioannis Bakolis

Ioannis Bakolis is senior lecturer in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. Before joining King’s College, Ioannis have previously held research positions at Imperial College London (2013-2015) and (2008-2012) and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2012-2013). During that time, Ioannis completed a PhD in Biostatistics and Epidemiology at Imperial College London (2013) under the supervision of Prof. Peter Burney and Prof. Richard Hooper.

Research Interests

Dr Ioannis Bakolis is interested in how social, built and physical environments affect the epidemiology of both physical and mental health. Some examples of Ioannis current work include exploring how exposure to road-traffic air and noise pollution affect mental disorders; and how neighbourhood deprivation relate to mental health over the life course. Ioannis is also a member of the core team of the Urban Mind project involving the development and use of smartphone technologies to monitor the impact of the surrounding physical and social environment on population mental health in real time. Although not exclusively, much of Ioannis work is conducted within large population-based surveys; birth cohorts and routinely collected information stemming from smartphone technologies and electronic health records.  

Ioannis research interests also extend to the use of quasi-experimental methods and data from hybrid trials on the evaluation and implementation of population health interventions and nationwide policies. Ioannis is a co-I and lead statistician of INDIGO and EMILIA, two recently MRC-funded projects which aim to tackle stigma and discrimination in 6 LMIC countries; TIDES, a study funded by the Wellcome Trust  for developing an intervention framework to address the role of discrimination by healthcare practitioners in generating and perpetuating health inequalities.  

Ioannis is also interested in issues of causal inference and statistical methods for intensive longitudinal data as they relate to his work.

• Urban environment and mental health 
• Social and environment stressors and mental health over the life course 
• Natural experiments  
• Hybrid trials

Teaching

• Co-Module leader: ‘Advanced Statistical Methods in Psychiatric Epidemiology’, Global Mental Health Msc 
• Module leader: “Intro to Statistical Modelling”, Applied Statistics and Statistical Modelling Msc  

Current course lectures  

• ‘Quasi-experimental designs’, Applied Statistics and Statistical Modelling Msc  
• Urban environment and mental health, Urban Informatics Msc 
• ‘Evaluation of scale-up of complex population health interventions’, Global Mental Health Msc 
• I currently supervise 3-4 MSc students per year for their final dissertations, and 4 full time PhD students. I am willing to accept new PhD students. Interested students should contact me with an idea of their project proposal in the first instance, with an indication of any potential funding support.

Expertise and Public Engagement

As expert commentator for the Science Media Centre Ioannis regularly provides comments on air pollution stories in relation to mental health in the popular media.