Interim Dean Kathleen Sikkema

Kathleen Sikkema, PhD, has made vital contributions to Columbia Mailman since joining as chair of Sociomedical Sciences in 2019, including advancing interdisciplinary research collaboration across the school, and playing a central role in the establishment of programs focused on population mental health, such as the Global and Population Mental Health Program, which she leads, and the Susan Lasker Brody Center for Population Mental Health, of which she is co-director. Under her leadership, the department experienced significant growth in implementation science focused on mental health, HIV, cancer, and substance use. She also oversaw the creation of a new PhD concentration in Social and Behavioral Sciences.

A clinical psychologist specializing in health and community psychology, she has led pioneering scholarship for more than 35 years on mental health and HIV with wide-ranging impacts, including the development of effective community-based prevention programs and interventions to improve care engagement in low-resource settings in the United States and internationally. She led research in South Africa for 25 years, most recently conducting clinical trials to examine whether mental health treatment integrated into HIV primary care for women who have experienced sexual trauma improves HIV clinical outcomes.

Sikkema previously served as the Gosnell Family Professor of Global Health and Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, where she was the founding director of the Global Mental Health Initiative at the Duke Global Health Institute and led the Social and Behavioral Sciences Core in Duke’s Center for AIDS Research. She has held faculty positions at Yale University and the Medical College of Wisconsin and is an honorary professor at the University of Cape Town. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from Virginia Tech.