Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Ghana and a Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She received her PhD in social psychology from the LSE, completed postdoctoral training at the University of Cambridge and has held teaching and research positions at the LSE, University of Cambridge and University College London, where she was a British Academy Global Professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies, between 2019 and 2023.

Her research focuses on chronic illness representations, experiences and care in African contexts. She also has a strong interest in arts and health, and how arts-based methods strengthen participatory approaches to community health development. She has taught, supervised, examined and mentored graduate students based in African, European, American and Australian universities on these research areas. She was inducted into the prestigious US National Academy of Medicine as an international member in 2019 “for research that contribute[s] to the development of unique interdisciplinary models to address Africa's chronic non-communicable disease burden”.

Ama de-Graft Aikins is the principal investigator of the British Academy seed-funded Chronicity and Care in African Contexts Project. The project examines how social responses to chronic conditions can shape public engagement and care interventions in continental and diaspora African communities. She is also a co-investigator on two projects: the Wellcome Trust funded HABVIA Project, which seeks to co-produce heat adaption strategies in four vulnerable communities in Ghana and South Africa; and the Horizon Europe funded M-CARE project which seeks to improve the care of patients with multiple long term chronic physical and mental health conditions in Ghana, Kenya and Uganda.

Selling Healing: Creative Arts and Health Communication in Ghana, published by Cambridge University Press in November 2025, is a major output of the Chronicity project, as well as of Professor Ama de-Graft Aikins’s longstanding interest in the arts and engagement with Ghanaian arts communities and institutions.