Dr. Ekblad, PhD, licensed psychologist is an affiliated professor in multicultural health and care research of the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), head of Cultural Medicine research group at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. She undertook her PhD in the Department of Psychiatry in the same medical university. Dr. Ekblad lectures on undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate level, mainly medical-, psychology and nurse students as well as residence doctors in psychiatry and family medicine, and PhD students. She lectures on global mental health, refugee mental health and interventions (primary, secondary and tertiary level), and qualitative design methods. Dr. Ekblad has been the main supervisor for several doctoral and Master students in both Sweden and abroad and has coordinated a national and international network of doctoral students and researchers in migration, social medicine and mental health. During several years Dr. Ekblad was one of the international facilitators and coordinator at Harvard course Global mental health: trauma and recovery and has been consultant for UNHCR and WHO. Her clinical work was developed in alcohol addiction and psychiatry and now she works partly as clinician in primary health care in a suburb where social disadvantaged groups are living.

Dr. Ekblad is interested in global mental health and virtual environment for training such as virtual clinical encounters between doctors and refugee patients in primary care for medical assessment and follow-up: To develop, test and evaluate the impact on empathy. Dr. Ekblad is further interested in how primary health clinics facilitie to detect and prevent health problems in children and young people whose parents are on long term sick leave; and an evidence-based Health promotion/ Lifestyle course for new-comers (refugees and female relatives) as well as research on improving early detection of refugee-related stress symptoms by evaluation of an inter-professional and inter-cultural skills training course. She is interested in qualitative design, especially grounded theory.