Judith Bass
Assistant Professor, Department of Mental Health
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Humanitarian agencies have a mandate to provide services to vulnerable populations around the world. When it comes to trauma-affected populations, this charge often includes improving their mental health and psychosocial well-being. A major challenge in this effort is the lack of empirical and evidence-based research to support the selection of appropriate services. Using examples from Uganda, Cambodia, and Northern Iraq, Judith Bass will describe the collaborative process that researchers have used to engage humanitarian agencies in assessing the needs of traumatized populations and identifying, implementing, and evaluating appropriate services.
Judith Bass’ research interests include designing and evaluating methods for assessing mental health and mental illness in non-Western cultures in order to use these assessments to investigate the effectiveness of innovative prevention and intervention strategies. She is currently working with an international NGO to evaluate programs for children in crisis, evaluating mental health interventions for populations affected by torture and trauma, and assessing perinatal depression among HIV-infected women in Brazil.
Free and open to the public.