About

I trained as a physician in Greece before moving to the UK, and I've spent the past two decades working at the intersection of public health research, policy, and advocacy. I'm currently Director of the Global Mental Health Action Network, the world's leading civil society network, working to keep mental health on the international health and development agenda. Before that, I was Director for Programmes, Research and Policy at the Mental Health Foundation, and I spent time in government and academia.

I can often be found teaching or mentoring. My work sits at the boundary between public health and mental health - I'm particularly interested in prevention, equity, the language we use around mental health conditions, the conditions that make us unwell or keep us well, physical-mental health integration, and how policy and evidence do or don't talk to each other.

My professional story has never been linear. The rest is even less so.

I'm a Greek Londoner and I've always felt a citizen of the world, which means I live in a permanent state of productive dislocation - between languages, between ways of understanding the same problem, between a southern European relationship with public life and a northern European relationship with institutions. I find it useful.

I write literary fiction in Greek and English. I've been interested in the social history of disease since before I can account for it - the way illness exposes everything that was already wrong, the way stigma outlasts the microbe, the way the same arguments recur across centuries in different costumes. These preoccupations move between my professional work and my fiction without always asking permission.

I'm a feminist, a mentor, a teacher, a carer. And a kind leader. These aren't labels I wear - they're orientations that surface in how I think and what I pay attention to.

I've spoken at the United Nations General Assembly, WHO forums, parliamentary events, and academic and policy conferences across Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. I write for professional and general audiences, in both advocacy and academic registers.

ēmvasis is where all of it lives together.