University of Liverpool Institute of Psychology, Health and Society
Dr. Atif Rahman is a clinical academic, specialised in child and adolescent psychiatry, with an interest in the mental health of women and children in developing countries. In his early career he trained at the Institute of Psychiatry, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and the Manchester Scheme for Training of Overseas Doctors. He was awarded the Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship in Clinical Epidemiology, completing his Masters in Research in 2001 and PhD in 2003 from the University of Manchester. He conducted a cohort study in rural Pakistan and his work was one of the first to demonstrate the link between maternal depression and poor infant growth. In 2004, he was awarded the Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship in Tropical Medicine (2004 - 2007). He developed and tested community-based complex interventions for maternal depression and child development in Pakistan, successfully completing the largest trial of a psychological intervention to be conducted in the developing world. He was appointed to the chair of child psychiatry at the University of Liverpool in January 2008. He continues to be active in the field of international mental health. His main areas of research are parental mental health and its impact on child development, early interventions to promote child development, and the community management of intellectual disability.