Our team

See who is involved in the NAMASTE project.

Senior leadership team

Professor Jonathan Green

Co-Principal Investigator

Jonathan Green is the lead investigator for NAMASTE, with overall responsibility for the programme. He is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at The University of Manchester and Hon Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.

He studied medicine at Cambridge, Paediatrics in London and Psychiatry in Oxford before establishing clinical and research groups in Manchester. He developed and tested early parent-mediated interventions for autistic development for both pre-school diagnosed children (PACT) and in the pre-diagnostic stage (iBASIS), and built on this evidence to advocate an early developmental pathway approach to autistic care that is now being applied in the UK and internationally. For the last 15 years he has collaborated with Sangath, India and colleagues in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal in adapting this intervention method for non-specialist community worker delivery in South Asia, running randomised clinical effectiveness trials, and undertaking early detection-care pathway implementation in local health systems.

Recently, he has undertaken participatory work with the autistic community, including a novel phenomenology project (Murray et al 2023) and a broad review of autistic phenomenology (Green and Shaughnessy 2023).

Jonathan sat on the most recent NICE development group for autism. He is a Senior Investigator in NIHR, Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, and UK Global Senior Leader for autism for the International Society of Autism Research (INSAR).

View Jonathan’s profile

Dr Gauri Divan

Co-Principal Investigator

Dr Gauri Divan is NAMASTE’s co-lead investigator based in India, with overall responsibility for coordinating between the four South Asian sites. She is director of the Child Development Group at the Indian non-governmental organisation Sangath.

As a developmental paediatrician, Gauri works in the areas of early child development, developmental disabilities and adolescent health. She has been working for over 20 years in developing community-based approaches to support children, families and youth.

She has worked on packages of care including a responsive caregiving video-facilitated intervention called Alana Palana, and the Parent mediated Autism Social communication intervention for non-Specialists (PASS) Plus, which uses video feedback with parents so that they can support their autistic child’s communication needs.

She has contributed to the development of digital tools to assess biomarkers of neurodiverse development. She has been on technical resource groups for the government of India, and has been a member of the Lancet Commission on the Future of Care and Research in Autism.

View Gauri’s profile

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Other senior leadership team members

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Other team members

Sangath, India  

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More about our study sites

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