Srividya N. Iyer, Ph.D., is the Canada Research Chair in Youth Mental Health and Learning Health Systems (Tier 1). She is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is a licensed psychologist and a Researcher at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. 

 

Srividya is an internationally recognized leader in youth mental health research, with expertise in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research. Her research focuses on understanding the lived experiences, mental health, and wellbeing of youth and on co-designing culturally and contextually relevant services, supports, and policies in Canada and globally. She integrates arts-based and participatory methods to open accessible and resonant spaces that honour non-verbal, embodied, and culturally grounded ways of knowing and can help amplify youth voices and experiences beyond the academy. 

 

Srividya is a research leader in Aire ouverte, Quebec’s integrated province-wide youth services initiative. Working with Dr. Chris Mushquash and many Indigenous young people, leaders and communities across Canada, she co-leads a pan-Canadian Indigenous integrated youth services network.  Srividya meaningfully contributes to various mental health capacity building and research projects globally, including in India (where she was born), Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Colombia. Earlier, she led ACCESS Open Minds, a pan-Canadian youth mental health network uniting youth, families, service providers, and policymakers, with 16 sites serving rural, urban, and remote communities.

 

Srividya has extensive experience in creative knowledge translation. She has co-created exhibitions, films, and websites in partnership with youth, families, and artists to translate research into engaging, accessible, multilingual, and memorable formats that resonate with diverse audiences. 

 

Currently, Srividya is working on several arts-based research projects with her students and global partners. Together with her doctoral student, Camila Velez, and a team of academics and lived experience experts, she is developing a Radically Relational Futures Fellowship. This initiative engages young people in exploring futures as relational and regenerative possibilities through creative and arts-based practices. She is interested in how body mapping can support youth in embodying and expressing the affective, symbolic, and relational dimensions of entangled, caring, and multispecies futures.