Appointment of two of the three planned joint appointments
The Institute of Psychological Health and University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology are pleased to announce the appointment of two of the three planned joint appointments. These are Associate Professors Fiona Challacombe and Felicity Waite.
Felicity Waite is a consultant clinical psychologist and researcher at the University of Oxford and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. She is deputy lead of the Oxford Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis clinical research group. The focus of her work is developing more effective and easily accessible psychological therapies for people with psychosis and young people at risk of serious mental health problems. The new treatments, developed in collaboration with people with lived experience of the problems, are then tested in large clinical trials. Her research takes a mechanistic, translational science approach with a focus on implementation from the outset. Two current multicentre projects include Feeling Safer and Sleeping Better. Feeling Safer tests a supported online psychological treatment for persecutory delusions delivered by peer support workers, graduate mental health workers, and clinical psychologists. In Sleeping Better the team hope to find out if treating sleep problems can prevent the onset of serious mental health problems. Felicity completed her clinical psychology training at the University of Oxford and received the British Psychological Society May Davidson Award in 2022.
Fiona Challacome is a clinical researcher in the field of perinatal mental health. Fiona won a Peggy Pollak research fellowship from the Psychiatry Research Trust and completed her PhD on perinatal OCD at King’s College London in 2014, which was followed by an NIHR clinical lectureship evaluating treatments for antenatal anxiety disorders. Her research aims to better understand mental health difficulties and other stressors during pregnancy and the postpartum, in order to advance interventions to give families the best start in life.
