Professor & Head, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry & PI-SAMVAD
Dr. John Vijay Sagar Kommu is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru. He completed his undergraduate medical training at S.V. Medical College, Tirupati, and MD (Doctor of Medicine) (Psychiatry) from NIMHANS. John has extensive academic, clinical, and research experience of over 20 years, having worked in reputed institutions like Christian Medical College, Vellore, and JIPMER, Pondicherry. He has been working as a Consultant Child Psychiatrist at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, NIMHANS for over 10 years. His current areas of interest include neurodevelopmental disorders especially ASD, pediatric psychopharmacology, adolescent mental health, child abuse, and neurobiology of child psychiatric disorders. John has authored 60 research papers and 7 book chapters. He was awarded the prestigious NIH(USA) funded Indo-US Fogarty Fellowship in 2014 and trained at the McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida. John was recently appointed Affiliate Faculty at the School of Biological and Population Health Sciences, Oregon State University.
Assistant Professor, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry & Co-PI, SAMVAD
With a super-specialty degree in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and intensive experience in community psychiatry, Dr. Rajendra supports the Community Child & Adolescent Mental Health Project on numerous issues pertaining to children in difficult circumstances. His particular interest is in adolescent mental health concerns, including emotional issues and substance use. He has implemented intensive research on self-harm behaviours in adolescents, also developing an intervention manual on managing such concerns. Amongst other areas of work, he also provides specialized assistance to children in conflict with the law, including providing a mental health and child rights perspective on legal issues, such as preliminary assessments. He spear-heads the Swatantra Services at NIMHANS, where specialized assistance is offered to children referred by child welfare committees, juvenile justice boards and child care institutions.
Former Senior Professor, Department of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry & Advisor-SAMVAD
Dr Shekhar is a child psychiatrist with 40 years of experience in the field of child mental health but his work extends beyond the clinical population, amongst others, to children in institutions, educational spaces and in the context of law, across the country as well as the South Asia region. With a view to enabling access to mental health for the most vulnerable child populations, his special areas of interest in child mental health are childhood trauma, gender and sexuality and life skill education. An artist and musician, he uses a number of creative methodologies in child mental health interventions, including theatre in development approaches. In the belief that wider psychosocial interventions are rooted in child rights, in addition to his preventive-promotive and curative child mental health interventions, he has undertaken various legal and policy-related initiatives. He was part of national deliberations on the POCSO Act 2012 during its drafting, and more recently an active part of the debates around the December 2015 Juvenile Justice Act on children in conflict with the law. He has also engaged extensively as a member of working groups of the National commission for protection of rights of the child on issues such as substance abuse and elimination of corporal punishment in school. Finally, all his policy and practice work find their way into training and capacity building programs for target audiences ranging from students of mental health disciplines and mental health care professional in clinical settings to child care service providers in non-clinical settings, including community health workers, teachers, government and non-government staff and counsellors and Judicial personnel.
Technical & Operational Lead
With a background in Medical and Psychiatric Social Work and Public Health, Sheila has worked in emergency and disaster contexts in Asia, Africa and the Middle-East. Her technical areas of work, over the years, include maternal & child health, nutrition and food security, water and sanitation, and child and adolescent mental and psychosocial healthcare; in these, she has been involved in program design and implementation, monitoring & evaluation, and human resource development. In recent years, through her work at NIMHANS, she has been engaged in child protection and mental health work, ranging from designing and initiating community child mental health interventions to policy and advocacy initiatives pertaining to child sexual abuse and juvenile justice laws. She is experienced in providing interventions on issues such as childhood trauma, adoption, and children in conflict with law. Consequently, she has developed a number of intervention methodologies and materials for assessment and intervention, including life skills education, for therapeutic and transformation work with children and adolescents. A large component of her work involves development and implementation of training & teaching programs through the use of pedagogies of participatory and creative methodologies; she trains various cadres of child care service providers within schools, health facilities and child care institutions, as well as members of the judiciary on a range of child psychosocial care issues. Her current research interests focus on transdisciplinary approaches to resolving complex problems in the context of the child and law, through engagement with judicial officers and developing innovative methodologies to provide mental health support to sexually abused children and children in conflict with law through statement recording and other evidentiary processes in court.
Project Officer (Mental Health)
Kritii, a trained social worker, but also a teacher and storyteller at heart, has over 3 years of experience working in the area of child protection. She has engaged with children in different contexts ranging from child care institutions to tribal areas, disability, trafficking and child labour. Her work involved strategizing and building creative ways to engage the communities in the rehabilitation process of children, while also mobilizing services and facilitating access to rehabilitation services through direct work with the government systems and families of children. With her interest in storytelling, Kritii not only uses stories in her training and teaching initiatives with child care service providers, but has developed stories and curriculums for children to raise awareness in schools on personal safety and child sexual abuse. She is deeply interested in the field of psychosocial support for children in difficult circumstances and believes that only by empowering systems and preparing them to engage with children, and leading the systems with kindness and compassion a friendly and safe child protection system can be built for children.
Project Officer (Policy & Law)
With a keen interest in working at the intersection of child rights, law and policy, Subham is a lawyer, working as a Project Officer (Policy & Law) at SAMVAD- NIMHANS. Prior to his current role, he has worked end-to-end in implementing a holistic life skills program for over two thousand students in rural government schools of Udaipur, Rajasthan. He has developed curricula on legal, financial and multicultural literacies for students, facilitated regular classroom training sessions, conducted district wide teacher training programs and led the monitoring and evaluation of various programs. He has also designed and led a program to build community learning centres in villages of Udaipur to alleviate the learning loss of students due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
IT-Coordinator
Aurobind is qualified in Computer Science as well as in Information Science. His core academic degrees are bolstered by further academic study and qualifications in Automation & Networking, Cyber Security, Education Technology & Guidance and Counselling. Since then, his career has spanned across both academia and industry. His early years were spent as a technical functionary at DBT-BINC Program, a Grand Challenge Program of DBT, Govt. of India) at Centre for Bioinformatics, Pondicherry University and System/Network Administrator at several Global IT companies. With his academic leanings, Aurobind then joined the NIMHANS Digital Academy, where he established the Virtual Knowledge Network (VKN), enabling innumerable training programs for mental health professionals around the country. He brings his VKN experience to SAMVAD, where he is responsible for enabling and supporting online learning and teaching programs. His research interests are in the area of Technology Enabled Digital Learning, Implementing Blended Training Model, and Data Analysis.