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Our research

Themes
Groups

Applied Clinical Research – developing, delivering, and evaluating evidence-based treatments for mental illness

Developing, delivering, and evaluating evidence-based treatments

Basic Clinical Research – understanding the causes and mechanisms of mental illness, using experimental medicine approaches

Understanding the causes and mechanisms of mental illness

The research is predominantly concerned with the development of children and adolescents in the face of adversity. There are two objectives. The first has been to elucidate the environmental mechanisms underlying development in adversity. The second has been to use this understanding to develop interventions to enhance children’s and young people's development and support their families.

Young people's development in adversity and delivering effective interventions

We work to understand the cognitive, biological, emotional and somatic processes underpinning the severe eating disorder Anorexia Nervosa in particular, and Eating Disorders in general. Our trans-disciplinary research, involving clinicians and neuroscientists, aims to translate research findings into novel treatment strategies.

Oxford Brain-Body Research into Eating Disorders

Centre for Suicide Research

Centre for Suicide Research

Our mission is to promote the healthy mental and physical development of children and their families around the globe, irrespective of their life circumstances. Our work focuses on development in the face of adversity, including perinatal mental health difficulties, life threatening conditions such as HIV and cancer, and situations of violence, war and poverty. We are working on how to improve access to mental health communication, supports and services, including in schools, online and using digital interventions.

Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Our research aims to understand how psychotropic drugs work at molecular level. By exploring this through clinical research in patients we contribute to the development of new evidence-based pharmacological treatments for severe mental illness.

Clinical Psychopharmacology

We investigate why people experience hallucinations and delusions, and use that knowledge to develop truly effective treatments for these problems. The Oxford Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis (O-CAP) research group, set up in 2011 by Prof Daniel Freeman, is one of the largest clinical psychology research teams in the world. Notable achievements include the development of a new, powerful psychological treatment for persecutory delusions (the Feeling Safe Programme) and the pioneering of automated psychological treatment delivered in virtual reality (VR).

Oxford Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis

Using computer models of behaviour, we aim to better understand anxiety and depression, and to guide the development of novel treatments.

Computational Psychiatry

CREDO was established in 1981. The main focus of its research is on the treatment of eating disorders. More recently, it has also developed methods to facilitate the dissemination of effective psychological interventions. It is in the process of creating a digital treatment for eating disorders (CBTe).

Centre for Research on Eating Disorders at Oxford

A Creative Collaborative for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research, Policy & Practice * Underpinned by Methodologies and Critiques from Cultural Psychiatry and Health Inequalities Research * Testing and Evolving Eco-Social, Bio-Psycho-Social, and Syndemic Frameworks

The CHiMES Collaborative

Blossom Early Adversity & Brain Health Programme is dedicated to investigating the effects of early life adversity on later life brain health, including mental health, cognition and dementia.

Early Adversity & Brain Health

We undertake research across the translational spectrum, ranging from basis science studies, through to trials of new treatments and approaches for psychosis, right through to researching clinical services and their effectiveness. We work closely with the Oxfordshire Early Intervention in Psychosis Service in Oxford Health NHS FT. This service provides high quality, multi-discliplinary care for people experiencing first episode of psychosis and their families. We also lead the Early Intervention Psychosis network for the NHS in the South of England, providing the opportunity to speed up the translation of new research findings into routine clinical care. You can find out more about our current studies below.

Early Psychosis Research Group

The aim of the ECoWeB project is to develop a mobile application (app) called MyMoodCoach to help young people improve their understanding of how emotions work. The app focuses on boosting the skills of recognising, understanding, and managing emotions in young people aged 16-22.

Emotional Competence for Well-being (ECoWeB)

The EXTEND: Personalised Care for Early Psychosis study is a multi-centre NIHR-funded study exploring the impact of duration of Early Intervention in Psychosis care on outcomes for individuals experiencing their first episode of psychosis.

EXTEND: Personalised Care for Early Psychosis

Our research includes projects in the epidemiology of mental illness and violent crime, violence risk assessment, prison health, pharmacoepidemiology studies, forensic services, and suicide and self-harm in prisoners and offenders. More recent work has focused on suicide prevention, particularly in people with severe mental illness.

Forensic Psychiatry

We want to understand how best to design a mental health databank which identifies active ingredients in preventing and treating depression and anxiety in young people. We have brought on board young people's voices on how to measure such active ingredients, and how such a databank might be designed, used, and shared. Along with colleagues in Cambridge, we work closely with young people, professionals, and researchers in South Africa and India. We welcome other collaborations and enquiries.

MindKind Study: preventing and treating depression and anxiety in young people

Nearly a third of dementia cases can be prevented by modifying our lifestyle, in particular our cardiovascular health. While we know that “what’s good for the heart is good for the brain”, we still don’t entirely know why. Our group investigates this heart-brain link in detail, by studying how the health of our heart and large blood vessels affect the brain and memory as we grow older.

Heart and Brain Ageing Group

OHBA is a research facility providing state-of-the-art techniques to measure or stimulate activity in the living human brain. Groups at OHBA investigate brain function in healthy volunteers, and in individuals affected by psychiatric and neurological conditions.

Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity

Developing new analysis tools for understanding human brain activity

Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity Analysis Group

Our work focuses on preventing depression, promoting mental health and enhancing human potential across the lifespan

University of Oxford Mindfulness Research Centre

Modifiable risk factors for dementia include those factors that can be altered or changed in some way (modified), usually for the better. The Lancet 2020 commission (Livingston et al., 2020) advocated that there are 12 risk factors which can be potentially modified to prevent or slow the progression of dementia. These are less education, hypertension, obesity, alcohol, traumatic brain injury (TBI), hearing loss, smoking, depression, physical inactivity, social isolation, diabetes and air pollution.

Modifying Dementia Risk

Our research aims to understand how individual genes contribute to the complex brain functions that are impaired in people with psychiatric disorders. By understanding these links we hope to improve treatments for these disorders.

Neural Correlates of Gene Function

We are dedicated to testing and developing new ways of improving treatments for psychiatric disorders, and maintaining brain health during aging. A significant proportion of people suffering from disturbances of mood and memory, do not respond to the available medication, and so there is an urgency to supplement or provide an alternative to current therapies.

Neurobiology and Experimental Therapeutics

Why do some people suffer from depression and memory loss as they age, whereas others stay well for the whole of their lives? We examine the effect of genes and life history on ageing using neuropsychology and neuro-imaging techniques as part of large scale epidemiological and experimental medicine studies.

Neurobiology of Ageing

We conduct independent ethics research and we deliver ethical guidance for a range of scientific and clinical studies in the Oxford Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience. We also work with a variety of international institutions and researchers. Our core research interests involve young people, mental health and neuroscience innovations in a global context.

Neuroscience, Ethics and Society

The Oxford Mental Health Economics and Policy (OMHEP) is a network focusing on the intersection of economics and mental health, bringing together academic and policy expertise from across the University of Oxford in order to provide high quality evidence to decision-makers in mental health care.

Oxford Mental Health Economics and Policy (OMHEP)

Our research group runs the OxWell Student Survey, an online school-based study that directly asks students about their mental health, well-being and school experience. Our aim is to ensure that school-aged children and adolescents, aged 9-18 years) can let us know how they are feeling and what might best help them. We are keen to learn about what students need, which factors influence their wellbeing, and how they would like to access help if they have mental health difficulties. The OxWell 2023 survey launched on February 21 2023 and over 200 schools in 6 local authority areas have signed up to participate with over 200 questions being asked. The OxWell Survey has previously been conducted in 2021, 2020 and 2019. We work closely with schools, local authorities and mental health commissioners and services and welcome collaborations with interested researchers and services. We would like to thank the schools and students for the considerable time they have spent participating in this work.

OxWell Study & School Mental Health

We are an international multidisciplinary group of researchers, clinicians (both psychiatrists and psychologists), statisticians, methodologists and students who aim to improve the current treatment practice in the NHS and across the world, using innovative approaches from artificial intelligence and machine learning, to digital mental health and bioethics.

Precision Psychiatry

The Oxford Psychological Medicine Research group aims to improve the lives of people with medical-psychiatric multimorbidity through high quality research.

We research the psychological and psychiatric problems of patients with medical conditions, develop innovative treatments to address these, and test the treatments in rigorous randomised trials.

Psychological Medicine Research

We explore how the brain processes emotional information and how this is influenced by brain chemicals and medicines. This helps us to understand disorders such as depression and anxiety and to understand and contribute to the development of drug and psychological treatments.

Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Laboratory

In partnership with Kindred Squared, SEEN is a research project to develop and pilot curriculum for Key Stage 3 pupils. It aims to embed the key principles of early child development and neuroscience for young people.

SEEN: Secondary Education around Early Neurodevelopment

Autoimmune Psychosis

Autoimmune Psychosis

We aim to better understand the determinants of student wellbeing and academic success, and to evaluate the mental health support needs of students at Oxford.

U-Flourish: Student Wellbeing Research

Talking to children and young people about illness and death is important for their mental health.

Talking to children about serious illness

We are interested in the molecular and neural basis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and how the risk genes for these disorders operate. We use a range of platforms, methods, and collaborations, to carry out this work.

Translational Neurobiology of Psychosis

Neuroimaging provides a window into the living brain, and is an increasingly vital experimental medicine tool for neuro-psychiatric disease. With a particular focus on early and pre-clinical disease, we explore how the brain changes before symptoms take hold.

Translational Neuroimaging

The Translational Neuroscience and Dementia Research Group undertake translational research ranging from mechanisms to drug development, and from discovery to qualification of molecular and imaging biomarkers in both Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease and in related dementia disorders. The group, led by Professor Noel Buckley, comprises molecular and cellular biology scientists, computational biologists and informaticians working with molecular, clinical and imaging datasets.
We have three main areas of activity, all aiming towards secondary prevention of dementia. By understanding disease mechanisms we seek potential therapeutics; through discovery of biomarkers we hope to enable preventative trials, and with informatics we utilise large biological and clinical datasets in the support of translational neuroscience.

Translational Neuroscience & Dementia Research

We aim to understand processes of selective attention and action, learning and memory in the human brain. Through experiments in healthy volunteers and patients with brain disorders we seek to characterize how information processing networks respond (adaptively or maladaptively) when challenged by interference. Our motivation is to develop rational neurocognitive intervention strategies to help promote recovery from conditions such as depression and brain injury.

Translational NeuroStimulation Lab

A daily and weekly remote symptom monitoring system for patients with over a decade of use in research and clinical service

True Colours