Shekhar Saxena is an Adjunct Professor of Global Mental Health at the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. He received his medical and psychiatry training at AIIMS, New Delhi where he worked later as a faculty member. He then moved to World Health Organization, Geneva and worked there for 20 years till 2018; the last 8 years as the director of mental health and substance abuse. He was the technical lead within WHO for the Mental Health Action Plan adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2013. Author of more than 350 academic papers, his expertise includes providing evidence-based advice and technical assistance to policy makers on organization of mental health services especially in low and middle income countries. He has contributed substantially to evaluating cost-effectiveness and return on investment of mental health interventions and application of this knowledge in actual program development. Dr Saxena led the WHO team in developing mhGAP resources that are being used in more than 100 countries to implement task sharing in the field of mental health.