Department of Psychiatry

Heart and Brain Ageing Group

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.

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

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.

SEEN: Secondary Education around Early Neurodevelopment

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.

Translational NeuroStimulation Laboratory

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.

Early Psychosis Research Group

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.

OxWell Student Survey

The OxWell Student Survey is an online school-based study that directly asks students about their mental health, wellbeing and school experience. Our aim is to learn from school-aged children and adolescents aged 9-18 years about what they need, which factors influence their wellbeing, and how they would like to access support if they have mental health difficulties. Since 2019, we have collected over 100,000 responses, providing us with unique and current insights into the lives of today's young people.We are so grateful to the students who take part and the schools and local authorities who have partnered with us. The fifth wave of this survey will take place from February - March 2025.

Talking to children about serious illness

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

Precision Psychiatry

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.

U-Flourish: Student Wellbeing Research

We aim to understand and promote mental health and wellbeing for university students.

Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity Analysis Group

Developing new analysis tools for understanding human brain activity

Neuroscience, Ethics and Society

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.

Computational Psychiatry

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

Translational Neuroscience & Dementia Research

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 Neuroimaging

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.

Centre for Suicide Research

Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Our mission is to promote the healthy mental and physical development of children and their families around the globe, irrespective of their life circumstances. We are working on improving mental health communication, and access to supports and services for children and adolescents. This includes community and school-based provision as well as online and digital mental health interventions. Our work focuses on the implementation of school and community-based interventions, child development in the face of adversity, including life threatening conditions such as HIV and cancer, and situations of violence, war and poverty.

Forensic Psychiatry

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.

Centre for Research on Eating Disorders at Oxford

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 (Digital CBTe).

Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity

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.

Psychological Medicine Research

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.

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