Professor Alan Stein is director of the Children and Climate Initiative at the School, and more broadly works with faculty, researchers and students on questions of global health policy. 

An expert in early childhood development and child and adolescent mental health, Alan has been a Professor at Oxford University since 2001. Before joining the Blavatnik School he held the Chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in Oxford's Department of Psychiatry. He holds an Honorary Professorship in the School of Public Health, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa; is an associate faculty member of the African Health Research Institute; and is Co-Investigator of the NIHR Policy Research Unit in Maternal and Neonatal Health and Care, National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford.

Alan has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals from The Lancet to Nature and has an H-index of 102. Throughout his career, he has worked with children and families facing adversity and has made a major contribution, both from a scientific and clinical perspective, on the relationship between parents in adversity and their babies. He illuminated the mechanisms by which early parenting influences children’s development, and pioneered interventions to support parents to facilitate their children’s development. He has been part of the leadership team of several randomised control trials and a number of large cohort studies across eight countries on three different continents following up children from the early years of life into adulthood. Among many grants, he has been funded continuously for the last 35 years through a series of awards by Wellcome. 

One research focus has been how to communicate with children about life-threatening illness (eg HIV, cancer, COVID), and his team have developed guidelines which have been disseminated across multiple countries, especially during the COVID pandemic. 

Alan has worked collaboratively with a range of colleagues throughout the global South, particularly in South Africa. He has supervised doctoral students from all continents, and mentors and supervises many research fellows, especially in the global context. 

Alan completed his medical training at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Most of his postgraduate medical training was undertaken in Oxford, and in 1988 he was awarded a Wellcome Trust Lectureship in the University of Oxford. From 1991 to 1994 he held joint Senior Research Fellowships at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge and in 1995 was appointed Professor of Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Royal Free and University College Medical School and the Tavistock Centre. In 2001 he returned to Oxford to take up the Chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.