Ameena Mumthaz

Ameena Mumthaz, MBBS, MMSc, is a physician and global mental health researcher. She holds an MBBS from Kerala University of Health Sciences, India, and a Master of Medical Sciences in Global Health Delivery from the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where her thesis examined illness journeys and care navigation among people with bipolar disorder in Northern Kerala's pluralistic mental health system. 

She completed a Tribal Health Fellowship, serving as a Medical Officer with Swasthya Swaraj Society in the tribal-dominated Thuamul Rampur block of Kalahandi district, Odisha, India, providing culturally adapted clinical care, treating conditions with high prevalence in the region, including malnutrition, leprosy, malaria, and tuberculosis; training tribal girls in the Diploma in Community Health Practice program; and training medical students and young doctors through a Rural Sensitization Program. 

She subsequently worked with Médecins Sans Frontières on two projects in India: primary health care and mental health screening for a displaced population that had fled the civil war in Chin State, Myanmar, to a border village in Mizoram, and multidisciplinary care for advanced HIV and tuberculosis in Patna, Bihar. 

During her master's, Ameena served as a Teaching Fellow for two courses, working with Joia Mukherjee and Nadeem Kasmani, in Global Health and Social Medicine and the Global Health Writing Lab: Narratives, Power, and Policy, supporting Global Health Delivery graduate students in narrative writing, policy advocacy, and crisis communication. 

Her work focuses on making mental health care more equitable, person-centered, and peer-supported for people living with severe mental illness in low-resource settings, with a long-term goal of advancing biopsychosocial, precision-medicine approaches to close the global mental health access gap. Ameena currently serves as a full-time Research Assistant with the Peer Support Initiative at the Mental Health for All Lab, Harvard Medical School.