Giovanni Abrahão Salum, MD, PhD

Giovanni A. Salum MD, Ph.D., is the Vice President of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Initiative in Greece (CAMHI). CAMHI is a program dedicated to enhance child and adolescent mental health care capacity and to help strengthen the infrastructure for the prevention, assessment, and treatment of mental health struggles faced by children and adolescents across Greece.

His interests include helping the co-construction of grassroots solutions to problems in underserved populations, democratizing access and training in psychosocial treatments for children and adolescents, and developing novel technologies that can be implemented in real-world settings to assess and treat mental health conditions.

Dr. Salum is a tenured Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, currently on leave to work at the Child Mind Institute. He directed the mental health services of the Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre from 2021-2022, the adult and the child & adolescent unit of the community center for mental health services in the same hospital from 2019 to 2021, and the mental health system of Porto Alegre, a Brazilian city with 1.5 million inhabitants, from 2017 and 2019, being responsible for all the mental health care services of the town.

He has experience in epidemiology, developmental psychopathology, and treatment research in the public health system. He is the principal investigator of large research projects such as the Brazilian High-Risk Cohort Study for Mental Conditions (BHRCS), the Pragmatic trial on Telepsychotherapy for health workers facing the COVID-19 pandemic (TelePSI), and the Brazilian National Census of Quality of Care in Community Psychiatry.

He received numerous honors, including awards from the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. He has more than 200 publications, including publications in the most prestigious journals in mental health sciences, such as the American Journal of Psychiatry and JAMA Psychiatry. His work has been well received by peers, reflected in more than 10.000 citations. He is currently associate editor of the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry.

• Director, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Initiative, Child Mind Institute & Stavros Niarchos Foundation
• Faculty of Medicine Associate Professor (Tenured), Department of Psychiatry and Legal Medicine, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
• Full member, Graduate Program on Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Psychiatry and Legal Medicine, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
• Director, Mental Health Service, Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre
• Director, Child and Adult Community Center for Mental Health Services, Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre
• Director, Mental Health System of the City of Porto Alegre, Public Health Sector of the City of Porto Alegre
• Assistant Professor, Graduate Program in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)

• Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Graduate Program in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Child & Adolescent Mental Health), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
• Clinical Fellow in Psychiatry, Hospital de Clínicas de Porto alegre (HCPA)
• PhD, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Child & Adolescent Mental Health), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
• Sandwich PhD, Emotion and Development Branch (Children & Adolescents), National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
• MD, Medicine, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)