Suicide by Self-Immolation (PDF)

University of Iowa (2018-2019). Dr. Alfonso has given over 200 international academic presentations in 25 countries throughout Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Americas.



Dr. Prabha S. Chandra, MD, FRCPsych, FAMS is a Professor of Psychiatry and the current Head of Department at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore. Dedicated to the cause of women's mental health, she is currently the President Elect of the International Association of Women's Mental Health and an executive member of the Marce International society for perinatal psychiatry. Professor Prabha Chandra has brought the field of perinatal psychiatry to the forefront in South Asia by starting the first integrated Mother Baby unit and outpatient perinatal psychiatry service in Bangalore at NIMHANS. She leads a team of young professionals in the field of perinatal psychiatry with her current active projects ranging from antenatal mental health and suicide in pregnancy, community cohort studies of mothers and infants using detailed mental health, mother infant interaction and infant measures, interventions for reducing second hand smoke exposure among pregnant women, and the biology of postpartum psychosis. She is also the principal investigator of Project MAHILA- an RCT on mobile phone intervention by nurses for rural women with HIV infection and depression in India. She has been the co-author for the WPA curriculum on violence against women and for the WPA position statement on perinatal psychiatry. In addition, she works actively in the fields of reproductive and sexual health among women, psycho-oncology, palliative care and ethics. Professor Prabha Chandra is also a keen teacher and has developed several innovative methods of training and assessment for psychiatry residents. She is published nearly 180 publications including several books. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and of the Indian Academy of Medical Sciences. She has been an NHS International Fellow and Consultant in Manchester, UK and a visiting professor at the University of Liverpool.



Professor Thomas G. Schulze studied medicine in Germany, the USA, and Catalonia. He trained as a psychiatrist and held positions in Germany (Bonn, Mannheim, Göttingen) and the USA (Chicago, Bethesda, Baltimore). Since 2014, he has held the position of Chair and Director of the Institute of Psychiatric Phenomics and Genomics at the Ludwig-Maximilans-University of Munich (IPPG). He is also on Faculty at Johns Hopkins University's Department of Psychiatry. Dr. Schulze's research focuses on genotype-phenotype relationship in psychiatric disorders. He coordinates a German-wide center grant on longitudinal psychosis research (www.kfo241.de ; www.PsyCourse.de ) and spearheads an international study on the genetic basis of response to lithium treatment in bipolar disorder (www.ConLiGen.org ), comprising several research groups from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia. He has authored over 200 papers. In addition to national German awards, he is the 2006 recipient of the Robins-Guze-Award of the American Psychopathological Association (APPA), the 2006 recipient of the Theodore-Reich-Award of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics (ISPG), and the winner of the Colvin Prize 2016 of the Brain & Behavioral Research Foundation (BBRF). He is a member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and served as the President of the APPA from 2015 through 2016. Since 2016, he has also held the office of President of the ISPG. From 2011 through 2017, he served as the Chair of the Section on Psychiatric Genetics of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). In 2017, he was elected to the Executive Committee of the WPA, starting a 6-year term as Secretary of Scientific Sections.