Amina Abubakar is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Public Health at Pwani University, Kenya and a Research Fellow at the Kenya Medical Research Institute/Wellcome Trust Research Programme. She is also an honorary fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, UK. Amina is a Kenyan psychologist, who co-leads the Neuroscience research group at Kenya Medical Research Institute-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, based in Kilifi, Kenya. This is a dynamic multidisciplinary research group interested in child and adolescent well-being. In collaboration with colleagues, she has developed measures of early child development which are currently in use in several African countries. In 2016, she won the Royal Society Pfizer Award in recognition of her pioneering psychological research in East Africa, and for the impact her work has had in the field of neurodevelopmental assessment. Her substantive work has focused on the adverse impacts of a range of health conditions on young people’s neurocognition and mental health. In 2016, she was awarded the MRC/DfID, African Research Leaders award to investigate the associations between executive functioning and mental health, medical adherence, risk taking behaviour and scholastic outcomes among adolescents in the context of HIV.
