Ibrahim Kasujja is a nutritionist and mechanistic developmental scientist, and a PhD candidate in the Centre for Global mental Health at King’s College London, within the Health Services and Population Research Department. His research focuses on hunger-related stress as a core developmental exposure, examining how it shapes children’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioural states and contributes to mental health and learning outcomes in resource-limited settings.
His doctoral work in rural Uganda integrates child-centred qualitative methods, measurement science, and advanced quantitative modelling, including structural equation modelling, to investigate how hunger-related stress becomes embedded within developmental pathways. He has developed and validated a novel tool, the School-based Food Insecurity Experience Scale (SFIES), to capture children’s lived experiences of school-day hunger. His work advances a mechanistic developmental and developmental psychopathology framework integrating social causation, social drift, and bidirectional pathways, demonstrating how hunger-related stress disrupts attention, emotional regulation, behaviour, and classorom engagement across development.
Alongside his academic research, Ibrahim is the Founder and CEO of Nurture Posterity International, a social enterprise addressing hidden hunger through fortified school feeding innovations. Through its NutriPosh model, the organisation has reached over 240,000 children across nearly 300 schools in Uganda, while supporting smallholder farmers and strengthening local food systems.
His research focuses on how hunger-related stress becomes biologically embedded in developmental trajectories of risk and resilience, with the aim of informing scalable, evidence-based interventions that improve children’s cognitive performance, emotional well-being, and behavioural outcomes in low-resource contexts.
