Samia Akhter-Khan is a psychologist interested in ageing and global mental health research, with a specific focus on exploring solutions to older adults’ loneliness. Her research applies interdisciplinary approaches, mixed methods, participatory action research, implementation science, and aims to foster international, transdisciplinary collaborations. Samia’s interests include valuing older people’s contributions, bridging the gap between science and practice, and early intervention.
Her PhD in Global Mental Health at King’s College London, supervised by Rosie Mayston and Matthew Prina, focuses on older adults’ loneliness in Southeast Asia. Applying both quantitative and qualitative methods, she explores the relationship between unpaid productive activities, such as caregiving and volunteering, and older adults’ loneliness from Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar. With older migrants from Myanmar, she tested the feasibility of photovoice as participatory loneliness intervention. Within her PhD work, Samia developed the Social Relationship Expectations Framework, a new influential theory for understanding loneliness and tailoring interventions to diverse contexts.
Her PhD work has been recognized with the American Psychological Association (APA) Early Career Outstanding Paper Award 2023 and the King’s Engaged Research Award 2025 and supported by a PhD fellowship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Samia’s work has been featured in Science Magazine, The Guardian, BBC radio, Daily Mail, The Times, The Independent, and other outlets. She has contributed multiple blog posts, e.g., for the British Society of Gerontology, and spoken on podcasts for the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and Science Magazine. The SRE Framework was also featured as top 10 most impactful articles of the year by APS in 2023.
Prior to joining King’s in 2021, Samia completed a BSc and MSc degree in Psychology at the Humboldt University Berlin. During her studies, she also spent a semester at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, two semesters at Duke University in the US, and one year in Myanmar for her master’s thesis research on older adults’ loneliness. In Myanmar, Samia volunteered with a local human rights organization and worked for HelpAge International. Between 2020 and 2023, she also worked for Boston University School of Medicine investigating pathways from loneliness to Alzheimer’s disease using data from the Framingham Heart Study. For this work, Samia received the NIH-funded Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program pilot grant from Boston University. At King’s, Samia also worked on a World Health Organization report on climate change and healthy ageing, which has influenced her current research focus on social connection in the context of climate change.
