Dr. Pamela Collins is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in the departments of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University, and a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Currently, she is on leave from Columbia/NYSPI and serving as the Associate Director for Special Populations and Director of the Offices of Special Populations and Global Mental Health at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Under Dr. Collins, NIMH will increase its focus on disparities in mental health both inside and outside of the U.S.

Dr. Collins completed her medical training at Cornell University Medical College and trained in psychiatry at Columbia University where she also completed graduate work in public health and an NIMH post-doctoral research fellowship. She studied cultural psychiatry and applied medical anthropology as a research fellow in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Collins' work focuses on mental health and psychosocial aspects of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. She and her colleagues developed the HIV prevention curriculum, "Our Selves, Our Bodies, Our Realities" to help women reduce risky sexual encounters, thereby reducing their risk of HIV infection. Her work also examines the contribution of social stigma related to mental illness and ethnicity to women's HIV risk.

Internationally, Dr. Collins has served on the secretariat of the MTCT-Plus Initiative, which provides HIV care and treatment to families in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In South Africa, Dr. Collins' work has examined the role of mental health care providers in development of HIV prevention interventions in psychiatric settings and the community mental health impact of HIV/AIDS. She has conducted training of health care providers in mental health and HIV/AIDS transmission, prevention, and counseling in Argentina, Zambia, Uganda, and South Africa. Dr. Collins is the Director of the interdepartmental Global Health Track at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

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