Daniel Vigo
SCIENTIST, MD, LIC. PSYCH, DRPH
Dr. Vigo is a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, and public health specialist, originally from Argentina.
After obtaining a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Psychology, an MD, and a Specialization in Psychiatry, Dr. Vigo worked in clinical, research, teaching, and leadership positions in both the public and private sectors. He developed the first Assertive Community Treatment Department in Argentina, a collaboration between Proyecto Suma, King’s College (UK) and Columbia University (US). Dr. Vigo then obtained his Doctorate at Harvard, where he focused on public mental health, specifically burden of disease estimation, service improvement, and health systems assessment.
Dr. Vigo is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed at the Department of Psychiatry and the School of Population and Public Health. He is also a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and an Adjunct Professor at Simon Fraser University. Additionally, Dr. Vigo is an Advisor to PAHO and WHO and is the Chair of the Services and Policy Workgroup of the WHO-World Mental Health Surveys Initiative. Dr. Vigo continues to publish peer-reviewed articles, books, and reports on diverse mental health issues. His work on Estimating the true global burden of mental illness (Vigo et al, Lancet Psychiatry. 2016 Feb;3(2):171-8) is amongst the most impactful in the field of psychiatry (#1 of all Lancet Psychiatry articles of similar age) and research in general (in the top 0.1 percentile of contemporary and all-time research outputs ever tracked by Altmetrics).
Dr. Vigo leads several projects at UBC, including the Needs-Based Planning for Mental and Substance Use Disorder Project, the Student E-Mental Health Project, and several psychiatric epidemiology studies of regional, national, and global scope. The goal of his e-Mental Health portfolio (which includes CIHR and Health Canada funded projects) is to create, administer and evaluate online e-interventions and screening tools, as well as to integrate them with existing brick and mortar services. He is also working in collaboration with the Computer Science department to develop algorithms to predict the risk of developing mental and substance use disorders due to COVID-19. By using machine learning techniques and applying those to health service utilization data, the ultimate goal is to facilitate access to effective treatments. To that end, he has also received funding from a UBC SIF grant to develop a Virtual Clinic at the Department of Psychiatry in collaboration with Lakshmi Yatham and Sophia Frangou.
Additional Affiliations
- Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine
- Assistant Professor, School of Population and Public Health, the University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine
- Lecturer, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
- Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University
- Scientific Advisor to Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO)/World Health Organization (WHO)
- Chair of the Services and Policy Workgroup, World Mental Health Surveys Initiative – World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School
