The Brain and Mind Institute is further ending the year on a positive note, as its founding director,
Prof Zul Merali, was appointed to the
World Dementia Council. He is among the nine new international leaders to join the council. The new council members come from different disciplines in the dementia field and are from Asia, Oceania, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The BMI family is proud and delighted in this well-deserved recognition.
The World Dementia Council helps change the lives of people with dementia by securing change through our projects, events, and publications. Through the collaborative strength of governments, industry, researchers, and health and social care systems all working together we can transform the prospects for people affected by dementia in all its forms so that the disease no longer negatively impacts lives in the way it does today. The World Dementia Council (WDC) is an international charity. It consists of senior experts and leaders drawn from research, academia, industry, governments, and NGOs in both high-income and low- and middle-income countries, including two leaders with a personal dementia diagnosis. The WDC has an executive team based in London, UK.
Prof Zul Merali's appointment comes at an opportune time when BMI is advancing its work through strategic partnerships and collaborations, in line with our ethos, to span from neuron to neighborhood. As we stand at the intersection of science, policy, and compassion, we appreciate that mental and brain health requires very united and interdisciplinary action, to scale beyond the current access to treatment challenges, especially in low- and middle-income countries, to bring the right care at the right time to the right place.
While reflecting on this appointment, Prof Meral observed that “By leveraging our unique lived experiences, expertise, and information through ground-breaking research, we truly can give people hope and means to improve the lives of those afflicted and make strides towards achieving our vision of “a healthy brain and healthy world". Truly, we have walked fast for far too long and have often left out the global south from opportunities to advance in mental and brain healthcare. To go far, we now must be deliberate and walk together, making discoveries and innovating solutions suitable to the cultural contexts in the global south. Partnerships are the vehicles that will make the dream of a healthy world a reality. Through the appointment to the World Dementia Council, I plan to use this platform to bring our shared vision of changing the lives of people with and affected by dementia in all its forms to reality."
The success of BMI's mandate is achievable through integrated, cross-cutting, multi-disciplinary collaboration with academia, government, grant organizations, philanthropists, and the business community. Leveraging these partnerships will provide the platform to address mental health using fact-based research, clinical trials, and emerging technologies.
The new members of the World Dementia Council are from Asia, Professor Suvarna Alladi, Professor of Neurology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India, and
Dr Ryoji Noritake the Director of the Health and Global Policy Institute Japan. From Oceania,
Professor Kaarin Anstey, the Senior Principal Research Scientist and Fellow at the University of New South Wales, Australia. From Africa,
Professor Adesola Ogunniyi the Professor of Medicine at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria, and
Dr Zul Merali the Founding Director at the Brain and Mind Institute, Aga Khan University, Kenya and Pakistan. From Europe
Professor Johannes Streffer the Senior Vice President and Head of Global Clinical Development at Lundbeck in Denmark. From the Americas,
Dr Ishtar Govia, Senior Lecturer at the Caribbean Institute for Health Research, Jamaica,
Drew Holzapfel serves as the Executive Director of The Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer’s Disease and
Provost Professor Arthur Toga is Professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, Psychiatry and the Behavioural Sciences at the University of Southern California USA.
