Gonzalo Martínez-Alés

Gonzalo Martínez-Alés is a psychiatrist and epidemiologist. He obtained the degrees of Licenciado en Medicina, Máster en Epidemiología, and Doctor en Medicina (Department of Psychiatry, with international mention and extraordinary prize) at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and the degrees of Master and Doctor of Philosophy in Epidemiology at Columbia University in New York (USA). He completed his Psychiatry specialty at Hospital Universitario La Paz in Madrid, where he later worked as an adjunct psychiatrist in the Bipolar Disorder Unit and attending to people with urgent mental pathology. He has conducted brief stays as a field researcher in Nicaragua, and as an NIH-Fogarty Fellow at the School of Public Health of the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor (USA).

Between 2017 and 2021, he was a researcher in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Program of the School of Public Health at Columbia University, investigating the social causes and potential interventions to prevent suicide and improve the treatment of psychosis (using multilevel epidemiology methods) and teaching Psychiatric Epidemiology and Global Mental Health to postgraduate students. Since 2022, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a clinical collaborator, he collaborates with the Causal Inference Program (CAUSALab) at Harvard University in Boston, where he uses observational data and modern methods of data science and causal inference to evaluate potential clinical and public health interventions to prevent suicide and treat the first episode of psychosis.

Since June 2023, he works as a researcher, teacher, and clinician in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York (USA). He is also a member of the Psychiatry and Mental Health Research Group of the Hospital La Paz Research Institute (IdiPaz) and the Biomedical Research Networking Center in Mental Health (CIBERSAM). He has published more than 85 articles in international scientific journals (H Index: 24 in January 2026), including the main psychiatry journals (JAMA Psychiatry, Lancet Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry) and public health (American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, American Journal of Epidemiology). His work has been repeatedly awarded (UAM-ASISA awards and from the Spanish Society of Biological Psychiatry for the best doctoral thesis, "Sidney Kark" award from Columbia University for commitment to global health and equity, "Paula J Clayton Award" from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, "Don Quixote" Award from the American Society for Hispanic Psychiatry, among others) and funded by organizations such as Fundación la Caixa, the Health Research Fund of the Carlos III Health Institute, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation - NARSAD or the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention, through competitive calls. He is a scientific consultant for public organizations such as the Basque Government, the Canary Health System, or the Ministry of Health of Spain.