Ajay Risal

Dr. Ajay Risal is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Kathmandu University School of Medical Sciences (KUSMS) and is leading the Department the last 11 years. He has been working in the field of Medicine for the last 15 years and specialized in Psychiatry a decade ago. As a clinician and an academic faculty, his primary research interest is to work on the neglected field of ‘mental health’ in the research naïve and resource-poor country like Nepal, where academic research in general, and psychiatric research in particular is least prioritized. He is also mainly involved in the cultural validation of psychiatric inventories (which are primarily in English) for the use among the Nepalese population. Recently, he has been working in the field of geriatric mental health. As a faculty in one of the largest University Hospital of Nepal, he is devoting his time in treating mentally ill patients and teaching undergraduate and postgraduate medical and nursing students the ‘core psychiatry’. He also guides postgraduate psychiatry and public health students, as well as the nursing students in their research activities: proposal writing, methodology and thesis building. During these years, he was also involved in different workshops for development of the academic curriculum and treatment protocols for the Psychiatry sub-specialty; one of the neglected area in Medicine He has so far published forty-three research papers national and international peer-reviewed journals, mostly as a first/corresponding author. He also writes papers (both in English and Nepali) in local media in order to help decrease stigma related to mental illness and improve the understanding of people in the issues related to mental health.