What a year for Psychiatry - the scope, ambition and impact of our research continues to blow me away. I am also so impressed and grateful for the commitment so many of you make to helping Psychiatry be a positive and welcoming place to be.
We have delivered some hugely important research this year: the PAX-D trial showed that Parkinson’s drug Pramipexole was effective for difficult-to-treat depression, we identified the likely chemicals in vaccines that reduced the risk of dementia, and we used novel participatory arts methods to understand peoples experience of mental illness and mental health services. We’ve surveyed tens of thousands of children about their mental health; piloted ground-breaking therapies for eating disorders.
Next year, the Department will be the new home of an NIHR Applied Research Collaboration, which in addition to Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, is testament to our status as an innovative, effective and world-leading Psychiatry department. Our Oxford Brain Health Clinic marked its five year anniversary having had more than 500 patients through its doors, having made a tangible impact on both research, including through UK Biobank, but also on patients’ lives by offering tests that make dementia diagnoses more accurate.
We’ve hosted and initiated many cross department and institutional collaborations, not only with other neuroscience departments, but also primary care and the Department for Women’s and Reproductive Health, and beyond. We’re agile and moving into new areas of research, such as on climate change, hosting a forum on climate change and mental health and boosting our team to conduct more research into that area; as well as playing a key role in Oxford’s first neurodiversity conference and the Oxford women’s health conference.
We have had a huge amount of success with funding awards and collaborations, with Cathy Creswell’s team being awarded £27 million from the Paul Foundation and £7 million from Wellcome to take forward their important work on child anxiety. The Bukhman Foundation has awarded Willem Kuyken’s Mindfulness Research Centre £1 million to help it achieves its global ambitions.
The Warneford Park redevelopment plans were submitted over the summer, and could have a transformative impact on our ability to turn scientific discovery into benefits of patients. If given the go-ahead, it could be a critical turning point for brain and mental health research. We are expecting to find out if the planning application has been approved some time in the new year.
In terms of People and Culture, we have been continuing to develop and deliver initiatives to make our department a welcoming and inclusive place to be. A huge thanks yet again to so many of our staff for filling out the staff survey – taking us to the top of the divisional leader board and also the highest academic department in the whole university. Our students also surpassed themselves, doubling completion rates. Obviously being first is wonderful, but the really important thing is that the more staff and students tell us what is going well and what isn’t, the greater understanding we have of needs and the greater the mandate to make positive change. We are working on that while we also continue to implement our Athena Swan Action Plan, with important initiatives like our Emerging Leaders programme making a real difference. There have been so many awards that I don’t have space to cover them all, but a special mention to our Race Equality Working Group and Race and Psychiatry Journal Club members who won a VC Award for Commitment to EDI.
We have said a fond farewell to Professor Klaus Ebmeier, Chair of old Age Psychiatry, who had been in the Department 20 years. Klaus led seminal work uncovering factors in mid-life that affect brain structure in later-life, particularly through the unique resource of 30 year follow up data of the Whitehall II study. He has also been a wonderful mentor to a generation of academics, including Anya Topiwala and Sana Suri still in Oxford. We are recruiting for that post at the moment. We have had four new Associate Professors (Max Taquet, Louise Johns, Amedeo Minichino and Lahiru Handunnetthi) and Jacinta O’Shea was made Professor. in 2026 we’ll be welcoming Armin Raznahan as the new WA Handley Professor of Psychiatry.
Thank you to all staff and students for your work and living our Department Values and Behaviours this year.