Nicole Votruba

Dr Nicole Votruba is political scientist and psychologist. She is postdoctoral researcher leading the design and implementation of a mental health intervention within the wider SMARThealth Pregnancy programme. She is co-coordinator of the Indigo Local study, a global programme to reduce stigma and discrimination in mental health, and secretary of the executive board of Mental Health in Human Rights FGIP. She is interested in global health/ mental health, women's mental health, implementation science, stigma/discrimination, gender, science-policy inter-relationships.

Before joining the SMARThealth Pregnancy programme, Nicole was a post-doctoral research associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. She coordinated several global mental health research studies, such as the Emilia programme and the Emerald programme. She was also policy officer of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health. In 2014-2016, Nicole coordinated FundaMentalSDG, a global initiative successfully contributing to the inclusion of mental health in the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

In her PhD, she investigated mental health science-policy interrelationships and policy priority setting in low- and middle-income countries, and developed the EVITA 2.0 action framework to improve, guide, and accelerate research evidence exchange with policymaking and evidence-based mental health policymaking.