Olayinka Atilola FWACP, FMCpsych

Dr. Olayinka Atilola is a registered medical practitioner in Nigeria fully registered under the Medical and Dental Practitioners Act. He is a trained Psychiatrist with a specialization in Child and Adolescent Mental Health. He is a Fellow of the Medical College of Psychiatrists of Nigeria as well as a Fellow of the West African College of Physicians. Aside from his training in Nigeria, he received complimentary training, outside Nigeria, in different aspects of the assessment and treatment of child and adolescent psychiatric disorders. He is an Alumnus of the Children and Youth Studies program of the International Institute of Social Studies in Hague, Netherlands. Dr. Atilola is currently an Associate Professor of Psychiatry with an interest in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. In the course of his academic and professional work, he has been involved in the training and design of child and adolescent mental health services at various levels. For instance, he is the team leader of a school-linked multidisciplinary team comprising applied behavior analysts; speech and language therapists, special education specialists, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists, for the assessment and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders. He is also the team leader, of a mental health services outreach for incarcerated children and youth in Lagos, in partnership with the Lagos State Ministry of Social Welfare. He has published at least 80 peer-reviewed articles in local and international journals. His main area of research interest is child and adolescent psychiatry. In this regard, he has critically examined theoretical models in child psychiatry research, conducted cross-cultural validity and measurement invariance studies in child psychiatry, assessed mental-health service needs of children within the youth correctional systems, and has been involved in school mental-health service research. Other areas of research interest include trans-cultural psychiatry, occupational mental health, and field epidemiology of mental disorders. Based on scholarly output and citations, he was ranked in the top band of the first 500 academic researchers in any field of human endeavor in Nigeria by SciVal (Elsevier) in both 2020 and 2021. Dr. Atilola is a Fellow of the Nigerian Young Academy of Science and a former Young Physician Leader of the World Academy of Science. He is also a co-founder of the International Child Mental Health Study Group, a group of young child & adolescent psychiatrists bridging child mental-health research gaps in the developing countries of the world.