Mark Jordans is a Professor of Child and Adolescent Global Mental Health at the University of Amsterdam, and Reader, Child and Adolescent Mental Health in Humanitarian Settings, at the Centre for Global Mental Health at King’s College London.

He is a child psychologist and works as Director of Research & Development for the NGO War Child in the Netherlands, where he directs a team of researchers evaluating a package of interventions to promote the mental health and wellbeing of children in areas of armed conflict.

Research interests

• Developing and researching systems of care, especially for vulnerable populations and humanitarian settings.
• Development, implementation and evaluation of psychosocial and mental health care systems in low and middle income countries, especially for children in adversities and in fragile states.
• Diverse research methods– with children and adolescents as the main focus, including qualitative research, health systems research, (cluster-) randomised controlled trials, implementation science, n=1 studies, validation studies, as well as intervention and measure development.
• Enhancing the interplay between research and practice, conducting research that is directly relevant for improving ongoing service delivery, which is reflected in working in both NGOs and academia.

Teaching

• MSc in Global Mental Health

Expertise and public engagement 

Mark is the founder and Senior Technical Advisor of TPO Nepal, a mental health NGO in Nepal, where he worked between 1999 and 2011. He has lead the Nepal team for several global mental health programs, including the PRogramme for Improving Mental health carE (PRIME), a consortium focusing on the integration of mental health into primary care in low resource settings, and the Emerald program researching the health system requirements for the integration of mental health into primary health care.

He is an advisor to several global mental health initiates, including several WHO expert committees and the Collaborative for mental health and psychosocial support for children in humanitarian settings. He was a commissioner for the Lancet Commission Report on Global Mental Health. For his research program at War Child he was the recipient of the Jacobs Best Practice Award.