Dr Felicity Waite has received the British Psychological Society’s prestigious May Davidson Award.
The May Davidson Award is an award for clinical psychologists who have made an outstanding contribution to the development of clinical psychology within the first 10 years of their work as a qualified clinical psychologist. This award is given in honour of the late May Davidson, a former President of the BPS.
Dr Waite is the Deputy Lead of the Oxford Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis research group in the Department of Psychiatry, and works to develop more effective and easily accessible interventions for people experiencing distressing delusions and hallucinations.
Examples of her work include the SleepWell project which aims to prevent serious mental health problems in young people at high risk. She has also contributed to the development and testing of the Feeling Safe Programme – a new psychological treatment for persecutory delusions, and the gameChange project which aims to transform services for people with psychosis by providing psychological therapies using immersive virtual reality.
She said:
“It was very nice and surprising news and I am very honoured. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to work in clinical research alongside so many inspiring patients, colleagues, and mentors.
I am hugely grateful for the generous collaboration of people with lived experience of psychosis. I would also like to thank all those in the department and trust who have so generously supported me over the last decade.”
Dr Waite was given the award alongside Dr Filippo Varese from the University of Manchester.
Previous winners of the award in Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry include Willem Kuyken (2006), Daniel Freeman (2008) and Cathy Creswell (2010).