‘Mhealth for Mental Health’ clinches $10,000 prize.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A University of Maryland medical student named Veena S. Katikineni is part of a pair of students that won a competition put on my Scientists Without Borders, in which they designed an innovative solution to deal with mental health issues.
Katikineni – along with Alejandra Leyton, a Bolivian-born health economist and master’s student at Tulane University, where she is studying public health – will split the $10,000 prize bestowed upon them. Their innovation is called “Mhealth for Mental Health,†which is an idea to use SMS text messaging services to provide fast, reliable, and relatively affordable information about mental health afflictions to communities around the world.
The Scientists Without Borders program is a joint initiative launched by Johnson & Johnson and the New York Academy of Sciences. The judges who made up the panel that ultimately chose Katikineni for the top prize was comprised of Sangath Goa at the Center for Mental Health, Public Health Foundation of India, Vikram Patel, of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (where he is an international mental health professor and senior research fellow) and Hilmi Quraishi of ZMQ, a Technology for Development social enterprise that she co-founded in India.
Originally from Rockville, Maryland – located not far from the University of Maryland’s College Park campus – Katikineni is devoted to healthcare research and medicine. Her Twitter page description says that she is a “Medical student, active open innovation solver, passionate about passion.â€
On her profile page for GHD Online, an Internet-based forum that “improves health care delivery through global collaboration,†Katikineni says that she is “very interested in issues related to building health infrastructure here in the U.S. and in low-resource countries. Through GHDOnline, I hope to gain some perspective on health issues, and incorporate them in my world view for the future.â€
She has done research in both the US and India, such as shadowing doctors at the Remedy Hospital in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh – she has also travelled to the city 23 times in her life so far. Katikineni stays on top of growing social and health-related issues around the world, and hopes to “continue staying active in public health issues in India in some capacity in the future.â€
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com