Rate My Professor Ioannis Bakolis

Ioannis Bakolis is Professor of Public Mental Health and Statistics in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, where he also serves as founding Deputy Director of the Centre for Mental Health Policy and Evaluation. He earned his PhD in Biostatistics and Epidemiology from Imperial College London in 2013, supervised by Professors Peter Burney and Richard Hooper. Before joining King’s College London, Bakolis held research positions at Imperial College London from 2008 to 2012 and from 2013 to 2015, as well as at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine from 2012 to 2013.

Bakolis’s multidisciplinary research integrates statistics, epidemiology, biology, geography, and computer science to examine how environmental stressors—such as air pollution, noise pollution, extreme heat, and neighbourhood deprivation—along with social adversity, affect mental and physical health across the life course. As a core team member of the Urban Mind project, he employs smartphone technologies to assess in real time the impacts of urban physical and social environments on mental wellbeing, demonstrating air pollution’s exacerbation of mental disorders, neurological conditions, and multiple long-term physical conditions in the UK. His expertise includes developing methods for rapid evaluation of mental health policies, interventions, and services through quasi-experimental designs and hybrid effectiveness-implementation studies for causal inference from observational data sources like population surveys, birth cohorts, electronic health records, and smartphone data. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bakolis led studies on excess mortality, mental health service utilisation, self-harm rates, healthcare workforce challenges, and domestic violence, influencing UK government guidelines and vaccination prioritisation for people with severe mental illness. He leads the ‘Advanced Statistical Methods in Psychiatric Epidemiology’ module on the Global Mental Health MSc and supervises PhD students. Key publications include ‘Mental health consequences of urban air pollution’ (2021), ‘Urban Mind: using smartphone technologies to investigate the association between the urban environment and mental health in real time’ (2018), ‘Characterising infectious disease mortality in severe mental illness’ (2026), and ‘Cross-cultural validity of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-Item Scale (GAD-7)’ (2026).