Scientific Committee for ICAMMHA 2025
Professor Vivette Glover
Professor Vivette Glover is Visiting Professor of Perinatal Psychobiology at Imperial College London. Her research has shown the effects of the emotional state of the mother during pregnancy, on the developing fetus and longer term on the child, especially on neurodevelopment. Her group have also studied the biological mechanisms that may underlie such fetal programming. More recently she has been involved in music interventions to reduce antenatal anxiety and depression, including in Africa. She has published over 450 papers. She is Treasurer of the Marcé Society, an advisor for the Early Intervention Foundation and a member of the Maternal Mental Health Alliance and the Global Alliance for Maternal Mental Health. She has been awarded the International Marcé Society medal, the John Cox medal, and the PIPUK award for Research into Pregnancy and Infant Mental Health. Her work is contributing to changes in government policy in the UK and elsewhere.
Ms Shanon McNab
Shanon McNab was the former Principal Technical Advisor with MOMENTUM Country and Global Leadership program where she co-led the Perinatal Mental Health portfolio and was the Technical Lead on the Respectful Maternal and Newborn Care portfolio. Shanon led MOMENTUM’s initial landscape analysis on perinatal mental health – ‘The Silent Burden: Understanding Perinatal Mental Disorders in Low-and Middle-Income Countries’ in 2022 and has been supporting MOMENTUMs work in PMH globally for last three years. Prior to joining MOMENTUM Shanon was the Associate Director for the Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) program at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, a position she held for 10 years. Shanon’s research and implementation support has included defining and measuring respectful maternity care in the U.S. and overseas, perinatal mental health, maternal and newborn health in urban settings, and human resources for health. Prior to joining AMDD, Shanon worked on strengthening family planning monitoring and evaluation systems in crisis settings; managing programs providing access to HIV prevention, care, and treatment for at-risk populations; and staffing international disaster response programs. Shanon has worked as a public health researcher and implementer for over 20 years with universities, UN agencies, USAID, local and international NGOs and city departments of health. Shanon holds a dual master’s degree in International Affairs and in Public Health from Columbia University and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Naomi Dick Kaba
Dr. Nicole Votruba
Dr. Nicole Votruba is a senior research fellow in implementation science at the Nuffield Department of Women's & Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford. She is PI and leading the design and implementation of the PRAMH study, a community-based perinatal mental health intervention, which is implemented in rural India in collaboration with the George Institute India. She is leading the process evaluation of the SMARThealth Pregnancy programme, and is co-lead of the multi-country Indigo Local study, developing a community anti-stigma campaign. Nicole is a psychologist, political scientist, junior research fellow at Wolfson College and honorary research fellow at the George Institute for Global Health (UK). She is Executive secretary of Human Rights in Mental Health-FGIP. She completed her PhD at the IoPPN, King’s College London, where she developed a framework for mental health science-policy priority setting in low- and middle-income countries (EVITA 2.0). She has experience in research and policy, working on a number of global mental health research studies, as policy officer of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health, and as coordinator of the FundaMentalSDG initiative for mental health in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Her interests are improving global health, women’s mental health, interventions to reduce stigma and discrimination, science-policy relations, and human rights for people with mental health conditions.
Dr Susan Pawlby
International Conference on Maternal Mental Health in Africa
