Dror Ben-Zeev, PhD, director of the BRiTE Center, is profiled in the Fogarty International Center’s March/April edition of Global Health Matters about his work in West Africa to improve treatment and reduce symptom severity for people with serious mental illness.

In 2017, Dr. Ben-Zeev saw news coverage of the plight of people with serious mental illness in West Africa. “I’m a pretty unflappable person,” he said, “but seeing the footage of men, women, and children chained and shackled to concrete slabs or to trees — or being intentionally harmed — was jarring.”

Dr. Ben-Zeev read widely about this topic and then traveled to West Africa and the University of Ghana where he met Professor Angela Ofori Atta — who would later become his co-PI — and began to refine his ideas around what a digital health researcher might do to make things better. Read the story here