Dr Nicole Votruba

About

Dr Nicole Votruba is the Principal Investigator of the SMARThealth Perinatal Mental Health project (PRAMH), a multi-phase study (funded by the Medical Research Council UK) designing and evaluating community-based mental health care for women during pregnancy and in the first year after birth. She is also leading the process evaluation of the SMARThealth Pregnancy programme (PI Professor Jane Hirst) and is co-coordinator of the Indigo Local study, a global programme to reduce stigma and discrimination in mental health.

Dr Votruba is a psychologist and political scientist interested in global mental health, women's mental health, reducing health inequity, implementation science, stigma/discrimination and science-policy inter-relationships.

Before joining the Nuffield Department of Women’s & Reproductive Health, Nicole was working with Professor Sir Graham Thornicroft at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, where she coordinated several global mental health research studies, including the Emilia programme and the Emerald programme. She was policy officer of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health, working with Lord Nigel Crisp, and 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 evidence-based mental health policymaking.

Dr Votruba is also a research fellow with The George Institute for Global Health UK at Imperial College. She is executive secretary of the NGO Mental Health in Human Rights FGIP.