Tom Burns is Professor Emeritus of Social Psychiatry at the University of Oxford. His research was predominantly health services research in community psychiatry, particularly complex interventions. He has published six books and over 300 papers including RCTs of vocational rehabilitation, intensive case management, and Community Treatment Orders. These latter two appear to be utterly ineffectual but despite this are currently being introduced worldwide. He was awarded the CBE in 2006 for services to mental health care. He remains interested in the centrality of relationships in psychiatry and the need for increased rigour, and attention to, research in psychiatry.

Gerry Byrne is Head of Attachment and Perinatal Services for Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, including the Family Assessment & Safeguarding Service (FASS Oxford, Wiltshire and Bath & North East Somerset), the Infant Parent Perinatal Service (IPPS) and the ReConnect Service (Buckinghamshire). The FASS and ReConnect services offer multidisciplinary, expert witness assessments and NHS treatments for severe parenting problems, including child abuse and neglect (physical, sexual, psychological maltreatment, and fabricated and induced illness).

Gerry is Clinical Lead for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy for the Trust for Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. He has worked in CAMHS for over 30 years, was lead nurse in the Inpatient Family Unit for many years, training in a wide range of evidence based assessment tools used in this field including the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, 1996), the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure (SSP, 1996), the Parent Development Interview (PDI, 2004), and the Narrative Story Stem (2005). He provides expert evidence in legal proceedings on cases involving child abuse or neglect, assessment of parenting and where child placement is at issue. Gerry was an Associate Clinical Director of CAMHS from 2007-10 and continues to play a key role in the development of Specialist Services in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire, Swindon 7 B&NES.

Mary Cannon is Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Youth Mental Health in the Department of Psychiatry, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. She also works as a consultant psychiatrist in Beaumont Hospital Dublin. Professor Cannon currently holds a Consolidator Award from the European Research Council to investigate the meanings and mechanisms of psychotic experiences in young people. She previously held an Advanced Training Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and a Clinician Scientist Fellowship from the Health Research Board (Ireland). Her longstanding research interest is in the area of childhood and adolescent risk and protective factors for adult mental illness, particularly psychosis. She and her team published an RCSI report on “The Mental Health of Young People in Ireland” in October 2013 and she co-edited a Special Issue of the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine on Youth Mental Health which was published in March 2015. She has served on a two Irish governmental taskforces on youth mental health and on substance use in third level education. She is Chair of the Academic Faculty of the College of Psychiatrists in Ireland and vice-chair of the Youth and Student Mental Health Mental Health Special Interest Group.

Sarah Casey is a final year BST trainee currently working in St Patrick’s University Hospital in Dublin. She was elected to the College of Psychiatrists Ireland Trainee Committee in 2018 and is passionate about recruitment and promotion of psychiatry as a career in Ireland. Special interest areas include Addiction and Learning Disability Psychiatry as well as active involvement with the Medical Council of Ireland.

Dr Gareth Cuttle coordinates the Gatsby/Wellcome Integrating Neuroscience Project at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Following a degree in Physiology at Cardiff, his postgraduate studies took him to Oxford, King’s College, London and Bristol. While at Bristol, he co-created pioneering courses in Communication Skills and Teaching and Learning for Healthcare Professionals. Gareth worked for several years in Brazil where he was head of a cell biology and neuroscience research laboratory and taught health sciences courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Gareth has been a medical science writer, editor and translator for academic journals and learned societies, as well as for the pharmaceutical industry, coordinating communications programmes and events for medical professionals.

Marta Di Forti is MRC Clinical Scientist Fellow and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Department of Social, Developmental and Genetic Research, Institute of Psychiatry, and Honorary Consultant Adult Psychiatrist, Lambeth Community team, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. In 2004 she was part of a successful grant application that supported the development of the Genetics and Psychosis (GAP) study. The GAP study collected data on 700 first episode psychosis patients and 400 controls. The study has so far generated 26 papers, as well as 8 PhDs including Di Forti’s own. She is particularly interested in the role of cannabis use in psychosis and was the first to show that use of high potency types of cannabis carries a higher risk of psychosis than use of traditional types. She now studies the interaction between cannabis use and genes predisposing to schizophrenia, and how cannabis changes the epigenome. In 2012 she was awarded the title of Visiting Professor at her alma mater, Palermo Medical School.

Dr Fiona Gaughran is Director of Research and Development at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in London, where she is the Lead Consultant for the National Psychosis Service. She is also a Reader in Psychopharmacology and Physical Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. Dr Gaughran is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians in London, Edinburgh and Dublin and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. As part of her role, Dr Gaughran is responsible for implementing new, evidence-based approaches to help people who have psychotic illnesses that have been resistant to treatment. She also has a keen interest in the physical health of people with psychosis and has published widely in this field. Her research interests are largely focused on the interface between physical health and severe mental illness and on the management of psychosis. She has published over a hundred papers and book chapters and recently co-edited books on “Treatment Refractory Schizophrenia” and “Physical Health in Schizophrenia”.

Michele Hill is a Consultant Psychiatrist in the Student Health Department in UCC since March 2017 and University Lead for Student Mental Health and Wellbeing since September 2019. She has extensive sub-specialty training in research, early intervention, and psychotherapy, and was the Associate Director of Schizophrenia Research in Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School during her time in the USA. She is a firm believer in the importance of early intervention and stage appropriate holistic care in young people with mental distress and mental illness and is currently leading out on a whole institutional approach to Student Mental Health and Wellbeing in UCC.

Based in Clare but working all over Ireland, Jo is an independent communications expert with extensive experience of working with groups within the health service to deliver training and communications development sessions.  In addition to the “front of room” experience of delivering training and team development sessions over 20 years, she has the following qualifications:  Membership to the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development; Qualified in N.L.P. (Neuro Linguistic Programming) to business and master practitioner level; FETAC Train the Trainer accreditation (Level 6).

Nick began writing and directing award-winning short films in 2003, culminating in his third, Shoe, being shortlisted for Oscar nomination in 2011.

Nick’s first feature The Drummer And The Keeper had its Irish premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh in July 2017, where it won Best Irish First Feature, and its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival that October. It was nominated in 5 categories at the 2018 IFTA Awards, including Best Screenplay for Nick’s script, with Jacob McCarthy winning the prestigious Rising Star for his portrayal of Christopher. Nick was one of three screenwriters nominated in the Best Feature Script section of the Irish Writer Guild’s annual ZeBBie awards 2018. To date The Drummer And The Keeper has won 18 awards on the global festival circuit, including the Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award for Best Film at the Cleveland International Film Festival, Best Foreign Film at the Newport Beach Film Festival and the Silver Award in the Score Bernhard Wicki Preis for Best Film at the Emden-Norderney International Filmfest. Nick was awarded Best Director at the Breaking Down Barriers International Film Festival Moscow.

A new feature script written by Nick, Bedsitterland, has recently reached the Quarter Final stages of two of the world’s most prestigious screenwriting competitions, the Academy Nicholls Fellowship and the Final Draft Big Break, and is in active development with Samson Films, with Nick also slated to direct. Bedsitterland was one of 36 projects globally selected for participation in the Berlinale Co-Production Market in February 2020.

In 2019, Nick set up an innovative independent writers room based in Dublin, The Story Works, with the aim of developing new long form drama projects with global potential. The first session of The Story Works was funded by and run in conjunction with leading Irish production company Green Pavilion over March-April 2019, and has yielded two separate projects for which pilot scripts are currently being commissioned to be jointly written by Nick and other participating writers. In November 1919, Nick was one of three Irish writers chosen to participate in a ScreenSkills-supported TV Writers Room Placement in Los Angeles, where he had the opportunity to shadow the Supergirl and S.W.A.T. writers rooms, and have meetings with several other leading Amercian TV showrunners.

Having qualified as a solicitor and given up his legal career the same day, Nick’s working life has been devoted to creative endeavours. In addition to his work in film, he is a Clio-winning advertising creative, responsible for high-profile campaigns for many leading Irish and international brands, most notably Guinness, for whom he wrote five masterbrand TV spots. He is also a Choice Music Prize-nominated musical artist and an Ian St. James Award-winning short fiction writer.

Kate Lovett is the Dean and is the chief academic officer of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She is elected for the period 2016–2021. She has worked for Devon Partnership Trust as a Consultant Psychiatrist in General Adult Psychiatry since 2001 as an inpatient and crisis consultant. Kate has a longstanding interest in training and education. She has been undergraduate Psychiatry lead for Peninsula Medical School and Training Programme Director for Adult Psychiatry. She was Head of School of Psychiatry for the Peninsula Deanery for four and a half years until 2016 when she gave up this role having been elected Dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. In that role she has lead work on recruitment and retention in the mental health workforce and been a driving force behind the #ChoosePsychiatry campaign. Her drive to develop systems that support compassionate care and recovery fuels her educational leadership and is underpinned by values of equity and fairness.

Grainne McAlonan is Professor of Translational Neuroscience in King’s College London. She uses MRI as a translational tool to link brain and behaviour in people with neurodevelopmental conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD); and to ‘back’ (and ‘forward’) translate to laboratory models. Her current research is informed by her work in the National ADHD and Autism Service for Adults at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) and she is Clinical Disorders Cluster Lead for the NIHR-Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at SLaM and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. McAlonan is a group leader within the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at IoPPN and is a lead investigator within the EU-AIMS-2-TRIALS consortium – a European network hosting the world’s largest grant for autism research. She is responsible for fetal/neonatal/infant brain imaging studies of children vulnerable to neurodevelopmental conditions and for pharmacology studies in adults with ASD.

Declan M McLoughlin PhD MRCPI MRCPsych FTCD qualified from University College Dublin in 1986 and trained in general medicine and psychiatry in both Dublin and London. Recent research activities include randomised controlled trials of ECT and ketamine in severe depression, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, molecular biomarkers (e.g. mRNA, miRNA, telomere length) for depression, plus projects on molecular mechanisms of action of ECT. His work has been supported by the Alzheimer’s Society, Wellcome Trust, NHS Health Technology Assessment Programme, NARSAD, and the Health Research Board.

Dr Regina McQuillan is a palliative consultant at St. Francis Hospice and Beaumont Hospital Dublin. She is an affiliated scholar of the Institute of Ethics at DCU, and honorary associate clinical professor at RCSI. She has interests in social inclusion and providing care for disadvantaged groups, such as people with limited English proficiency, Travellers, homeless people and people with learning/intellectual difficulties and also people who are deaf, or who have acquired hearing loss. She also has an interest in recognizing the palliative phase of dementia and frailty, including for those in nursing home settings.

Veronica O’Keane is a professor in psychiatry in TCD and a consultant psychiatrist in the Tallaght Psychiatry Services. She has a wide range of clinical and research experience and is now interested in the brain mechanisms underlying human emotional experience. She has over 100 original scientific publications and will have her first book in popular science published by Penguin UK in August, titled ‘The Rag and Bone Shop: how we make memories and how they make us’.

Seamus O’Mahony recently retired from his post as consultant gastroenterologist at Cork University Hospital. He is clinical professor at UCC, where he continues to teach case-based ethics and medical humanities. His first book, The Way We Die Now was published in 2016, and won the British Medical Association’s Chairman’s Choice Book Award in 2017. His second book, Can Medicine Be Cured? was published in 2019. He has published widely in the medical humanities, and is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review of Books, the Medical Independent, and the Lancet. He is a member of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death, which is due to publish its report in 2020. He is currently working on his third book.

Kieran was born in Belfast, educated at Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, and University College Dublin. He is a published poet with 4 collections, A Sun’s Eye (2012), And, Thinking Of (2014), Travelin’ Still (2018), and Air ( 2019 in preparation). He is also a child and adolescent psychiatrist trained in Canada and America, and has practised clinical and academic medicine for 47 years in the UK, Canada, America and Ireland. This has included 12 years of personal psychoanalytic training in both Freudian and Jungian analysis. His parents Mary and Pearse O’Malley founded the Lyric Players Theatre in Belfast in 1951, which was initially a 50 seat studio theatre attached to his family home at 11 Derryvolgie Avenue. It moved to the banks of the Lagan River at Ridgeway Street in 1968, and now continues as a grand building. His mother Mary started the literary magazine Threshold in 1957. His early life experience forever changed, and shaped his life. He married Siobhan in 2008, and between them they have 7 adult children, and 3 grandchildren, living in America, Canada, UK and Ireland.

Dr. Siobhán O’ Sullivan is the Chief Bioethics Officer at the Department of Health and is responsible for drafting policy advice and legislative instruments on bioethics related issues. She is also Honorary Professor in the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland, where she teaches Healthcare Ethics and Law and is involved in curriculum development. From 2002-2010, Dr. O’Sullivan was Director of the Irish Council for Bioethics an independent, autonomous body to consider the ethical issues raised by developments in science and medicine. She is the vice-chair of the European Group on Ethics in Science & New Technologies, an independent, multidisciplinary body advising the European Commission in connection with Community legislation or policies. She also represents Ireland on the Committee on Bioethics in the Council of Europe. She is a former member of the Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, the Irish Government’s high-level advisory body on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) policy issues. She received her Doctor of Medicine from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm in 1998 and holds a Masters in Healthcare Ethics and Law and a Masters in Human Rights Law.

Dr Paddy Power trained in adult psychiatry, initially in Ireland, then Australia, and completed training in child & adolescent psychiatry in London. He joined the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre EPPIC in Melbourne in 1993 and in 1998 became its Deputy Medical Director. In 2000, he moved to the South London & Maudsley NHS Trust to establish an early intervention service called the Lambeth Early Onset (LEO) service. In March 2010, Dr Power moved to Dublin to establish a youth mental health service (18 – 25 year olds) at St. Patrick’s University Hospital.

Dr Power’s research and publications include epidemiology of psychosis, RCTs of antipsychotic medication, CBT and psychosocial interventions, suicide prevention interventions, youth mental health, effectiveness of community treatment orders, cannabis & psychosis, and health economic evaluations. Dr Power was R&D Lead for the Borough of Lambeth. He set up the London Early Intervention Research and Services Networks and co-hosted the 2006 IEPA meeting in Birmingham. He has been an executive board member of the International Association of Young Mental Health, was chairperson of the (Youth Mental Health) SIG of ACAMH, Ireland, and is chair of the Early Intervention in Psychosis Clinical Advisory Group of the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland.

Liz is a clinical professor in the Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, Division of Psychiatry, UCL. She studied medicine at the University of Birmingham and gained her MD from the Institute of Neurology at UCL. Her research focuses on epidemiology and health services research in end of life care for people with dementia and on dementia and delirium in acute hospitals. She is the principal investigator on the Empowering Better End of Life Dementia Care (EMBED-Care) NIHR/ESRC programme. She works clinically as consultant lead for older people’s liaison psychiatry at North Middlesex University Hospital with Barnet Enfield and Haringey Mental Health Trust.

Dr Narayanan works as a Consultant General Adult Psychiatrist in the Clare Mental Health Services HSE West with a special interest in Addictions. He is the lead for the pilot Dual Diagnosis programme in the Mid West region and he is also an Adjunct Senior Clinical Lecturer in the University of Limerick. Dr Narayanan has completed his Masters in Addiction from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London in addition to his ongoing PhD in Epigenetics from the same institution. Previously he has also completed a Masters in Biological Psychiatry from Trinity College Dublin and he has been an active member of the HSE National Working groups on Dual Diagnosis and Emerging Drug Trends in Ireland.

Evan Yacoub has been working as a consultant psychiatrist for people with a learning disability for over a decade. He recently received a Health Service Leadership Academy Leading Care 1 Award and an Irish Management Institute Graduate Award in Executive Healthcare Leadership. He has recently been appointed as MHID national development clinical lead. He is also a current member of the executive committee for the European Association of Mental Health and Intellectual Disability. He was previously Chair of the Faculty of Learning Disability Psychiatry at the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland. He is currently a Trustee on Council of the College.