Assistant Professor

**Location**
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University of Warwick Campus, Coventry

**Department**
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Warwick Medical School - Health Sciences

**Position Type**
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Full Time, Fixed Term

**Duration**
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Fixed-term until 30 September 2025.

**Salary**
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Competitive

**About the Role**
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You will join the Warwick Medical School Mental Health and Wellbeing Unit as an Assistant Professor and support the outputs and dissemination for two externally funded projects: the NIHR funded “Transforming Access to Care for Serious Mental Disorders in Slums - the TRANSFORM Project” and the MRC-funded “Implementing Early Mental & Physical Health Detection & Support: Promoting a Whole-School Approach to Health and Well-being” (ISOBAR).

**About You**
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You will have a research background in a health-related social science, You will have a PhD in a health-related social science, health management, global health, applied health, implementation science or related field, together with experience of converting research results into tangible outputs, including publications.

You will have responsibility for monitoring research activities in consultation with the Principal Investigator (PI) and Warwick Project team, and for ensuring that the project outputs are captured and disseminated. You must have the ability to produce high quality progress and final reports and other project outputs, and present and publish high quality research outputs. You will also support the teams in both projects in developing bids for further research funding.

You will have specialist knowledge and experience in global mental health or health services research. You will work in partnership with partners in Bangladesh, Canada, India and Nigeria. Therefore, experience of working with universities and stakeholders in overseas countries would be advantageous. You will need to have effective interpersonal skills to communicate with teams involved in the projects.

You will be line managed by the PI but will operate with a considerable degree of autonomy and initiative on a day-to-day basis with mínimal supervision.

Knowledge and skill in literature searching and use of electronic databases together with Microsoft Office, SPSS or other relevant analytical software, Review Manager, Endnote or equivalent are also essential.

**About the Department**
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The Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing focuses on applied research into development and transitions across the life span, early interventions, prevention of illness and promotion of wellbeing. The centre consists of a unique combination of experts in psychiatry, public health, cardiovascular health, psychology, social sciences and community paediatrics, interested in a life course approach. Research activities include epidemiology, trials of complex interventions at individual, family and community levels, and understanding socio-cultural and environmental determinants of mental health and wellbeing. Academic teams staff are internationally renowned for their impact on improving mental health and wellbeing across the life span, and in both clinical groups and the general population.

ISOBAR will implement and evaluate an evidence-based programme to prevent and/or delay the onset or progression of mental (anxiety, depression, psychosis) and nutritional disorders (malnutrition and obesity) in adolescents aged 12-18 years in India & Nigeria. We will build on our previous work in these countries, to implement a whole-school intervention focused on physical and mental health and well-being. The intervention will be contextualised for each study site to promote awareness, identify youth in distress and prevent the emergence of serious mental and nutritional disorders in adult life. Some of the specific objectives include, raising health literacy amongst staff and students; screening and detecting emerging mental and physical health problems and promote appropriate help-seeking; collaborating with specialist services to prevent progression and accumulation of disability and creating a sustainable pathway that links local educational, health and social care systems for improved access to care for those requiring specialist care. We will develop a hub-and-spoke model of trained school counsellors to provide mental health literacy, physical and mental health screening and appropriate support in three schools at each site using a ‘stepped-wedge’ paradigm in a total of nine schools and measure outcomes at the level of the school and the individual. Our project aims to develop an effective, affordable and sustainable composite intervention which would advance local and regional preventative health policies for internalizing, externalizing and nutritional disorders in adolescents, thereby encouraging the adoption of evidence-based interventions.

TRANSFORM aims to improve access to care and outcomes of SMDs in slums, by