Julia R. Pozuelo

Julia R. Pozuelo, PhD, is a Research Scientist in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Her research aims to improve mental health treatments for people in low-resource settings. Trained in economics and psychiatry, she brings these disciplines together to address three related questions: where and why treatment gaps arise, how evidence-based interventions can be delivered at scale, and how treatment can be further improved for individual patients and providers.

Her current work includes OptimizeD, a large NIH-funded precision treatment trial examining which treatment for depression – antidepressant medication or psychotherapy – works best for different patients, with the goal of improving treatment selection in primary care in India. She is also a co-investigator on BRIDGE-AI, a Wellcome-funded study exploring how artificial intelligence can support the training and supervision of non-specialist counselors delivering psychotherapy for depression in India.

Julia holds a BSc in Economics from Carlos III University of Madrid, an MSc in Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Psychiatry from the University of Oxford. Previously, she worked as a Research Analyst at the Brookings Institution and as a researcher at the University of Oxford. Julia is also a member of the Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Group at the University of Oxford, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, and an honorary researcher in the MRC/Wits-Agincourt Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.