Who’s Who
Crick Lund
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Professor Crick Lund is Director of the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health at the University of Cape Town. He is CEO of PRIME (Programme for Improving Mental Health Care), a DFID-funded research consortium focusing on the integration of mental health into primary care in low-resource settings, and Principal Investigator of AFFIRM (Africa Focus on Intervention Research for Mental Health) U19 NIMH Collaborative Hub. He trained as a clinical psychologist and was involved in developing post-apartheid norms for mental health services for the national Department of Health. He also worked on the development of the WHO Mental Health Policy and Service Guidance Package, and consulted to Lesotho, Namibia, Indonesia, South Africa and Zimbabwe on mental health policy and planning. His research interests lie in mental health policy, service planning and the relationship between poverty and mental health in low and middle-income countries.
Marguerite Schneider
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Dr Marguerite (Margie) Schneider is a researcher in the field of disability studies, and Assistant Professor and Deputy Director at the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health, UCT. She started her career as a Speech-Language Pathologist and Audiologist before moving into broader social science research focusing on disability studies. She has worked at the Community Agency for Social Enquiry, the WHO, the Human Sciences Research Council and as an independent consultant in the field of disability studies. A number of her publications have been on disability measurement and she is involved in the Washington Group on Disability Statistics which aims to develop internationally comparable survey measures of disability.
Petra du Toit
Alzheimer’s South Africa NPC, South Africa
Petra du Toit is Executive Director of Alzheimer’s South Africa. She specialised in Medical Social Work at the University of Stellenbosch, and has worked as a social worker in the fields of dementia, mental health, military social work and trauma. In 2011, Petra joined Alzheimer’s South Africa as a social worker and was appointed as Executive Director in 2015. She is passionate about contributing to the quality of life of people living with dementia and their families working towards the development of a National Dementia Plan for South Africa in cooperation with relevant role players, establishing and developing a Dementia Friends Programme in South Africa, and supporting and actively taking part in research in the field of dementia in South Africa.
Roxanne Jacobs
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Roxanne Jacobs has joined the South African team at the Centre for Public Mental Health at the University of Cape Town, as an early career researcher on the STRiDE project. She is a research psychologist with a background in psychology, research methods and gender women’s studies. Roxanne has worked with multi-disciplinary teams both locally and internationally on public health- and social science subject areas, with a particular focus on injury prevention and the psychosocial recovery of vulnerable groups to adverse events within a resource constrained setting like South Africa.
Sumaiyah Docrat
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Sumaiyah Docrat is a South African health economist and PhD candidate at the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health, University of Cape Town. Sumaiyah’s work has included the development of cross-country research methodologies, the analysis of household survey and health system financing data and ongoing engagement with key stakeholders involved in mental health services and financing across the six low-and-middle income country sites of the Emerald (Emerging mental health systems in low- and middle-income countries) Project.