Gary Belkin

Billion Minds Institute | Columbia School of Public Health
Founder and Director | Professor

---

A psychiatrist who approaches mental health as a building block of social policy and progress, he recently founded Billion Minds as a “think-action tank.” The intention of Billion Minds is to link mental health solutions to better manage other problems of great scale, with a primary focus on the challenges of adaptation to climate and environmental crisis. An initial effort was leading a global collaboration in coordination with the UNFCCC Race to Resilience to produce a strategy for integrating psychological resilience capability within climate resilience capacity building, policy, and finance, launched at COP28. That strategy, the Roadmap for Care and Change, has since been put to work through the formation of the Global Resilience Observatory, which is accelerating implementation of that strategy.

Gary is also the former Executive Deputy Commissioner in the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where he led the Division of Mental Hygiene and its development and implementation of the innovative NYC-wide public mental health initiative, ThriveNYC. Before joining city government, he was Medical Director for Behavioral Health across the Health and Hospitals Corporation of the City of New York and served as Founding Editor in Chief of the open access journal Global Mental Health.