Mary Bitta
Implementation Scientist
Dr. Mary Bitta is an implementation scientist specializing in mental health at BMI. Her work focuses on developing and testing contextually relevant interventions to address the treatment gap for mental, neurological, and substance use disorders in low-resource settings. She has led and collaborated on numerous impactful research projects across sub-Saharan Africa.
Notably, Dr. Bitta founded the Difu Simo Mental Health Awareness Initiative, a campaign using participatory approaches to tackle stigma against individuals with mental, neurological, and substance use disorders. She also collaborated in an NIHR-funded multi-country study with the World Health Organization, implementing the Mental Health Gap Action Program (mhGAP) Intervention Guidelines in Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania. This project enhanced the capacity of primary healthcare workers to detect and manage common mental, neurological, and substance use disorders, significantly reducing stigma and improving access to mental health care.
As an Early Career Global Mental Health Fellow at Harvard University and AKU-BMI, Kenya, Dr. Bitta is at the forefront of developing strategies for mental health education, research, and care. Her academic journey, marked by a Ph.D. in Psychiatry from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom (February 2023), and a Master's in Global Mental Health from King's College London (September 2017), has led to her current research focus on bridging the treatment gap for mental and brain health disorders in low-resource settings.
Dr. Bitta is actively collaborating on several projects aimed at improving mental and brain health in low-resource settings. In addition to her appointments at AKU-BMI and Harvard Medical School, she serves as a visiting scientist at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and the KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya. A complete list of her published work can be accessed using this this link.
