Alvaro Barrera

Alvaro is a Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford, Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and a Consultant Psychiatrist at Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. He completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge and worked in neuropsychiatry at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. He works on the impact of empathy in clinical psychiatry and has edited a recently published book on empathy in psychiatry and mental health care with Oxford University Press. He has received the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Faculty of General Adult Psychiatry of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and three awards for improving safety and sleep on acute general inpatient wards. He was PI of the first pilot RCT of CBT for insomnia on an acute inpatient ward, co-edited the Oxford Textbook of Inpatient Psychiatry, and works on the role of digital technology in psychiatry. Alvaro works on the psychopathology and cognitive neuroscience of severe mental health disorders, including formal thought disorder, the disorganization dimension, auditory and tactile hallucinations. He is involved in teaching medical students as well as training foundation doctors and core and advanced psychiatry trainees at Oxford.