Allan Kalungi, PhD

Dr. Allan Kalungi is a Research Scientist at the Department of Psychiatry, Makerere University, and a Fellow of the Child Mental Health in HIV-Impacted Low-Resource Settings in Developing Countries: Global Research Fellowship (CHILD-GRF). His research interest is in unravelling the genetic risk that underlie psychiatric disorders among ethnically diverse African populations, which are currently underrepresented in global psychiatric genetics research. He has special interest in understanding the genetic risk for behavioral and emotional problems among Ugandan children and adolescents living with HIV. He is currently investigating the role of stress and telomere length in the persistence and incidence of behavioral disorders among Ugandan HIV+ children and adolescents. He is also currently a NARSAD young investigator, where he is investigating the genetic risk for major depressive disorder among ancestrally diverse participants from Eastern (Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia) and Southern Africa (South Africa), who are attending the NeuroGAPPsychosis study. He is also further interested in understanding whether the comorbidity between major depressive disorder and schizophrenia is genetically distinct from depression.