Department of Psychiatry
University of Oxford
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  1. Our research

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
The Oxford Autism Research Centre brings together scientists, charities and service providers from across Oxfordshire and the surrounding regions.
Oxford Autism
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
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
Communication Support
Communication Support
Using computer models of behaviour, we aim to better understand anxiety and depression, and to guide the development of novel treatments.
Computational Psychiatry
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
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)
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 mission is to prevent depression and enhance human potential across the lifespan through the therapeutic use of mindfulness.
University of Oxford Mindfulness Research Centre
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
Our research group runs the OxWell Student Survey, an online study that asks students aged 9-18 years over 200 questions on a range of well-being and mental health measures. Our aim is to ensure that school-aged children and adolescents can directly 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. In 2021, more than 30,000 students from 180 schools in four English counties participated.  The OxWell Student Survey has previous data collection points in 2019 and 2020. 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 time they 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
CREDO was established in 1981.  It is funded by the Wellcome Trust.  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
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
Centre for Suicide Research
Centre for Suicide Research
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

Publications

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Find all our latest publications here

© 2022 Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, OX3 7JX
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  • About
    • Introduction
    • Key facts and figures about the Department
      • Annual Report 2021-22
      • Annual Report 2020-21
      • Annual Report 2019-2020
    • Welcome to the Department of Psychiatry
    • Athena SWAN
      • Professional and Support Staff Career Support
    • NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre
    • The Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics
    • Contact us
    • Editorial Team
  • News
  • Events
  • Our research
    • Psychological Medicine Research
    • Translational Neurobiology of Psychosis
    • Oxford Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis
      • Projects
      • Resources
      • Books
      • Projects
      • The Feeling Safe Programme
      • The Feeling Safe Programme Illustrated Explainer - Transcript
    • Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Laboratory
      • Our research
      • About us
      • Current studies
      • www.perloxford.org
    • Neurobiology and Experimental Therapeutics
    • Clinical Psychopharmacology
      • Taking Part
      • Announcements
    • Neural Correlates of Gene Function
    • Neurobiology of Ageing
      • For Your Diary: Lifebrain Closing Conference - 29th June 2022 - Oxford, Blavatnik School of Governance
    • Forensic Psychiatry
      • Files
    • Centre for Suicide Research
      • Research Projects
      • Other Research
      • Multicentre Study of Self-harm in England
      • GOV.UK
    • Centre for Research on Eating Disorders at Oxford
    • Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
      • Subgroups
      • Recent Studies
      • Announcements
      • Webinars
      • Twitter
      • Using a Place Based Approach and Generating Collective Impact to Change Outcomes and Practice in the Early Years
      • School Mental Health
      • Older Studies
      • Global Project Locations
    • Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity
      • Research Groups
    • Oxford Brain-Body Research into Eating Disorders
    • University of Oxford Mindfulness Research Centre
    • Young people's development in adversity and delivering effective interventions
    • Developing, delivering, and evaluating evidence-based treatments
    • Understanding the causes and mechanisms of mental illness
    • World Association for Social Psychiatry (WASP)
    • Translational Neuroimaging
      • Research projects
      • Key collaborators
    • Translational Neuroscience & Dementia Research
    • Neuroscience, Ethics and Society
    • Computational Psychiatry
    • Early Psychosis Research Group
      • Research Projects
      • SINAPPS2 TRIAL
    • Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity Analysis Group
      • Example Projects
    • Oxford Autism
      • Research in Autism
      • Service Providers for Autism
      • News and meetings
    • Precision Psychiatry
      • PAIDEIA: MINDFULNESS
      • PAIDEIA : Physical Activity
    • True Colours
      • True Colours Infographic Narrative Description
    • U-Flourish: Student Wellbeing Research
      • Frequently Asked Questions
      • Blog Posts
    • Heart and Brain Ageing Group
    • Communication Support
      • Communicating the Death of a Loved One
      • Communicating Difficult News about the Health of a Child or Adolescent over the Phone
      • The Importance of Communication to Children
      • Research Background
      • Webinars
      • Guide for Schools
      • Guide for Families: How to tell Children that someone has died
      • Care Staff Guide: Contacting Relatives by Phone to Communicate the Death of a Resident
      • Guide for Healthcare Professionals: Telephoning Relatives about the Death of a Patient from COVID-19
      • Guides for Care Homes
      • Support for Care Homes: Coping with bereavement and grief during the pandemic
    • OxWell Study & School Mental Health
      • OxWell School Survey: Frequently Asked Questions from Parents
      • Slides for Pupils in years 5-7 on the OxWell Student Survey
      • The OxWell School Survey on Mental Health and Wellbeing - Information for Parents
      • OxWell Survey Pupil Information Video - Years 5-7
      • Pupil Survey - Information for Schools
      • Preliminary Summary Report from the OxWell School Survey 2020
      • OxWell Survey Student Information Video - Years 8-13
    • Translational NeuroStimulation Lab
      • Dr Gershon Spitz
      • Dr Margot Overman
      • Plasticity Group
      • Effects of non-invasive brain stimulation on reward-guided decision making in adults with low mood
      • Computational Psychiatry
    • SEEN: Secondary Education around Early Neurodevelopment
      • Expert Advisory Groups
    • Emotional Competence for Well-being (ECoWeB)
    • MindKind Study: preventing and treating depression and anxiety in young people
      • Become a Youth Advisor for the Global Mental Health Databank Project
      • The MindKind App Study
    • The CHiMES Collaborative
      • Co-PACT
      • ATTUNE
    • Autoimmune Psychosis
      • About Us
      • Studies
      • Get Involved
      • Advice for Clinicians
      • Resources and Glossary
  • Study with us
    • Study with us
    • Undergraduate Students
      • 5th Year? Interested in Psychiatry?
    • DPhil and MSc by Research
      • How to Apply
      • Scholarships & Studentships
      • Some Possible DPhil Projects
    • MSc Taught Course in Clinical and Therapeutic Neuroscience
      • How to Apply
      • Course Handbook
      • MSc Clinical and Therapeutic Neuroscience Studentships
    • Clinical trainees
      • Projects for Academic Psychiatrists in Training
      • Careers in academic psychiatry
  • Work with us
    • Job opportunities
    • Welcome and Orientation
    • Department life
      • Work events
      • Social events
      • Getting involved
    • Family Friendly and Part Time Working Group
      • Departmental support for maternity leave
    • Career Development
    • Learning and Development
    • Committees and Management
      • Athena Swan Working Groups
    • Anti Harassment and Bullying
      • Sources of Support
      • Department Harassment Officers
  • Our team
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  • Get Involved
    • Friends of Oxford Dementia and Ageing Research (OxDARE)
    • Volunteers needed for Dementia Prevention Study: European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD)
    • The effect of pramipexole on brain function in healthy volunteers
    • Are you experiencing low mood?
    • We are looking for people who are currently on antidepressants
    • OxPALM: Oxford study on Probiotics and Low Mood
    • Are you interested in how sleep functions and how sleep affects your mood?
    • Healthy Adults and Stroke Survivors Needed for Motor Learning Study
    • Volunteers Needed For Parkinsons Disease Study.
    • Sleep habits and personality traits in Borderline Personality Disorder
    • Facial Expression Analysis in Mood Assessment
    • Healthy Volunteers Needed For Study Of Reward and Emotion.
    • Healthy volunteers needed for a drug study investigating how a commonly-used antidepressant influences how people process emotional information about themselves and others.
    • Are you experiencing depression despite taking antidepressants?
    • The Oxford Institute of Clinical Psychology Training and Research
    • Reward, Emotion, Learning and Ketamine Study (RELAKS) Study.
    • Healthy Volunteers for EEG study investigating information processing in first-episode psychosis
    • The Everyday Confidence Survey
    • The Effect of Losartan on Threat and Reward Processing
    • In-human validation of a novel non-invasive brain stimulation device in healthy adults
    • Participants Needed for a virtual reality (VR) Heights Experience
    • Emotional Processing Study
    • We want to understand what COVID-19 does to the brain.
    • How clinicians use the output of Artificial Intelligence tools to inform their decision making
    • Are you interested in participating in a virtual reality study on pain?
    • Helping adults talk about their serious illness with children. Join us online on 6th July 2022 at 10am or 13th July at 10am