Educational Background
M.Psych, UNSW Sydney, Australia
Ph.D., Medicine (Epidemiology & Biostatistics), UNSW Sydney, Australia
Scholarly Interests
Prof. Alvin K. Tay is a clinical psychologist, epidemiologist, and global mental-health researcher whose work focuses on improving mental-health systems, services, and workforce capacity, particularly in humanitarian and resource-constrained settings. His research spans scalable psychological interventions, implementation science, population mental health, psychosocial wellbeing, and the measurement of psychological outcomes and clinical competencies. More recently, his work has also examined how technologies, including machine learining, generative AI, can support training, assessment, supervision, and research in global mental health.
Selected Publications
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Tay AK, Silove D. The ADAPT model: bridging the gap between psychosocial and individual responses to mass violence and refugee trauma. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences. 2017;26(2):142-145. doi:10.1017/S2045796016000925
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Tay AK, Riley A, Islam R, Welton-Mitchell C, Duchesne B, Waters V, Varner A, Moussa B, Mahmudul Alam ANM, Elshazly MA, Silove D, Ventevogel P. The culture, mental health and psychosocial wellbeing of Rohingya refugees: a systematic review. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences. 2019;28(5):489-494. doi:10.1017/S2045796019000192
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Tay AK, Mung HK, Miah MAA, Balasundaram S, Ventevogel P, Badrudduza M, Khan S, Morgan K, Rees S, Mohsin M, Silove D. An Integrative Adapt Therapy for common mental health symptoms and adaptive stress amongst Rohingya, Chin, and Kachin refugees living in Malaysia: a randomised controlled trial. PLOS Medicine. 2020;17(3):e1003073. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1003073
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Tay AK, Rees S, Miah MAA, Khan S, Badrudduza M, Morgan K, Fadil Azim D, Balasundaram S, Silove D. Functional impairment as a proxy measure indicating high rates of trauma exposure, post-migration living difficulties, common mental disorders, and poor health amongst Rohingya refugees in Malaysia. Translational Psychiatry. 2019;9:213. doi:10.1038/s41398-019-0537-z
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Tay AK. The mental health needs of displaced people exposed to armed conflict. The Lancet Public Health. 2022;7(5):e398-e399. doi:10.1016/S2468-2667(22)00088-3
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Tay AK, Rees S, Tam N, Kareth M, Silove D. Developing a measure of adaptive stress arising from the psychosocial disruptions experienced by refugees based on a sample of displaced persons from West Papua. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research. 2019;28(1):e1770. doi:10.1002/mpr.1770
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Tay AK, Miah MAA, Khan S, Mohsin M, Alam ANMM, Ozen S, Mahmuda M, Ahmed HU, Silove D, Ventevogel P. A naturalistic evaluation of group Integrative Adapt Therapy (IAT-G) with Rohingya refugees during the emergency phase of a mass humanitarian crisis in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. EClinicalMedicine. 2021;38:100999. doi:10.1016/j.eclinm.2021.100999
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Somasundaram D, Jayasuriya R, Perera R, Thamotharampillai U, Wickremasinghe R, Tay AK. Effect of daily stressors and collective efficacy on post-traumatic stress symptoms among internally displaced persons in post-war northern Sri Lanka. BJPsych Open. 2023;9(6):e180. doi:10.1192/bjo.2023.563
Biographical Information
Prof. Alvin K. Tay is a clinical psychologist, epidemiologist, and global mental-health researcher whose work sits at the intersection of global mental health, measurement, and technology. He develops and evaluates scalable approaches to understanding and improving human wellbeing and performance, drawing on psychometrics, epidemiology, artificial intelligence, and population-level data.
Over an 18-year career spanning academia, humanitarian settings, social entrepreneurship, and the United Nations, his work has focused on translating mental-health science into systems that can operate at scale. Since joining United Nations Headquarters in New York in 2018, he has led the development and global implementation of data-driven psychosocial wellbeing services supporting personnel across more than 125 duty stations, including high-risk humanitarian, peacekeeping, and political settings. He also led large-scale mental health and psychosocial needs assessments across 20 operational settings (e.g., Ukraine, Gaza, Türkiye, Libya, Egypt, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Zambia, Nigeria, Colombia, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Fiji), culminating in the UN’s first psychosocial data observatory. He continues to advise the UN on psychosocial wellbeing strategy.
Before putting down roots in New York, Tay spent more than a decade in Australia working with trauma-affected and humanitarian populations across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. His work combined implementation science and social entrepreneurship to adapt and scale community-based psychological interventions across Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines, in partnership with 150+ organizations including UNHCR, UNFPA, and WHO. He has authored more than 100 publications (e.g., in JAMA, Lancet, World Psychiatry, etc) and currently teaches and mentors students at Teachers College, Columbia University.