Dr Annemaree Bickerton
Dr Annemaree Bickerton trained in psychiatry at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and completed her subspecialty child psychiatry training at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London. From the outset of her training in psychiatry Dr Bickerton had a strong interest in working with the families and carers of consumers with mental health issues. Since 1997, Dr Bickerton has been a key educator and consultant in the Working with Families and Carers Program which originated to establish a culture of family-sensitive practice in the Adult Mental Health Service at Sutherland Hospital. From 2005-2009, Dr Bickerton was a member of the Working with Families Statewide Training Project in partnership with the NSW Family and Carer Mental Health Program.
Additionally, since 1995, Dr Bickerton has worked clinically as a child and adolescent psychiatrist at St George Hospital in Sydney. She has had a lead role in establishing the St George Intensive Care Assessment Team who work with highly distressed young people and their families to establish systems of safety.
Prof David Castle
MSD Senior Research Award Presentation
David is currently Chair of Psychiatry at St Vincent’s Health and The University of Melbourne. He is a former MRC Research Scholar at the South African Institute for Medical Research, MRC Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (where he gained an MSc in epidemiology), and has trained both in clinical research and psychiatry at London’s prestigious Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry.
David’s clinical and research interests include schizophrenia and related disorders, cannabis abuse, and bipolar disorder. A specific area of interest is the medical care of people with a mental illness. He is also pursuing his work on OCD spectrum disorders, notably body dysmorphic disorder.
David’s track record demonstrates a capacity and understanding to disseminate research findings to the scientific, academic and clinical communities through regular publications. He has published over 350 articles and book chapters; and has produced 16 books, aimed at clinical, academic and lay audiences. He also shows a strong commitment to feeding back information to the populations he studies, and is regularly invited to present at scientific, local, and lay meetings.
Dr David Chaplow
Margaret Tobin Oration
Dr David Chaplow is the national Director of Mental Health and Chief Advisor for New Zealand, a role he has held since 2001.
He graduated from Otago University (1968) and practiced general medicine for ten years before training in psychiatry and forensic psychiatry in Queensland, graduating in 1983 as a Fellow of the Royal Australia and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP). He practised in both the private and public arena before returning to New Zealand and in 1989 he was appointed as the inaugural director of Auckland Regional Forensic Services.
David has regularly been consulted on Australasian forensic psychiatry service development. For six years he was an Australasian College examiner and for four years he chaired the RANZCP’s Section of Forensic Psychiatry. In 2001 he was awarded a New Zealand Queens Service Order for services to the Parole Board and to Forensic Mental Health Services.
Prof Jeremy Holmes
Professor Jeremy Holmes is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. For 35 years he worked as Consultant Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist in the NHS, providing a district psychotherapy service, focusing especially on people with Borderline Personality Disorder. He was Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists 1998-2002. Now partially retired, he has a small private practice; set up and co-runs a Masters and now Doctoral psychoanalytic psychotherapy training program at Exeter University, where he is visiting Professor; and lectures nationally and internationally.
Professor Holmes has written or edited 120 papers and book chapters in the field of attachment theory and psychoanalysis, and 15 books including John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (1992), and co-editing Oxford Textbook of Psychotherapy (2005, with Glen Gabbard and Judy Beck). His latest is Exploring In Security: Towards an Attachment-informed Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (Routledge 2010). He was recipient of the 2009 New York Attachment Consortium Bowlby Ainsworth Founders Award.
Prof Ma Hong
Professor Ma Hong is the Director of the Department of Public Mental Health, Institute of Mental Health, Peking University; and Executive Director of National Center for Mental Health under China-CDC.
She is specialised in crisis intervention and public mental health, and is one of the very few professionals who have participated in almost all major post-disaster interventions in China since 1999. Recently, she dedicated a lot of time to improving the mental health service system in China, and has co-initiated several related projects, such as the community integrated mental health service model of China, supported by WHO.
Professor Hong works closely with the central government of China and at the same time maintains extremely strong ties with local mental health service teams. She also leads several programs in collaboration with and support from different international organisations, among them WHO, UNFPA and AusAID.
She has investigated several research programs, including the MOH-UNFPA project “Protection and Assistance to Vulnerable Population Affected by the Earthquake in China”, and the China-Australia project “The development of protocols for psychosis treatment and management and mental health human resources building”.
Director of the Department of Public Mental Health, Institute of Mental Health, Peking University; and Executive Director of National Center for Mental Health under China-CDC.
She is specialised in crisis intervention and public mental health, and is one of the very few professionals who have participated in almost all major post-disaster interventions in China since 1999. Recently, she dedicated a lot of time to improving the mental health service system in China, and has co-initiated several related projects, such as the community integrated mental health service model of China, supported by WHO.
Professor Hong works closely with the central government of China and at the same time maintains extremely strong ties with local mental health service teams. She also leads several programs in collaboration with and support from different international organisations, among them WHO, UNFPA and AusAID.
She has investigated several research programs, including the MOH-UNFPA project “Protection and Assistance to Vulnerable Population Affected by the Earthquake in China”, and the China-Australia project “The development of protocols for psychosis treatment and management and mental health human resources building”.
Prof Sir Robin M Murray
Professor Sir Robin Murray is Professor of Psychiatric Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, South London and has spent most of his working life there apart from one year at NIMH in the USA. His particular interest is in understanding the causes of psychosis, and he and his colleagues have contributed to the understanding that environmental factors such as obstetric events, heavy cannabis use and migration increase the risk of developing schizophrenialike psychoses. He is also involved in testing new treatments for psychotic illnesses, and looks after people with psychosis at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. According to ESI ScienceWatch, Professor Murray is one of the most frequently cited schizophrenia researchers in the world; he has supervised 35 PhDs and 28 of his students have become professors.
Prof Perminder S. Sachdev
Professor Perminder Sachdev is Scientia Professor of Neuropsychiatry at the University of New South Wales and Clinical Director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute, The Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney. He graduated from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi in 1978 and completed his MD in Psychiatry in 1983 before migrating to New Zealand. He then relocated to Australia where he completed his psychiatric training and PhD (1991). His doctorate was on the ethnopsychological concepts in Maori culture.
Professor Sachdev’s early work in neuropsychiatry was on drug-induced movement disorders, in particular akathisia, tardive dyskinesia and neuroleptic malignant syndrome. His most recent work has been in dementia and pre-dementia syndromes, in particular relating to neuroimaging, neuropsychology, biomarkers and risk factors. He has extensively examined the outcome of psychosurgery, and is currently involved in examining brain stimulation techniques for psychiatric disorders. Professor Sachdev is Past-President of the International Neuropsychiatric Association and inaugural Chair of the Section of Neuropsychiatry of The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. He has published five books and over 300 papers in peer reviewed journals. His most recent books are The Yipping Tiger and other tales from the neuropsychiatric clinic and Secondary Schizophrenia. He was awarded the 2010 NSW Scientist of the Year for Biomedical Sciences.
Dr Cornelia Wieman
Dr Cornelia Wieman, is Canada’s first female Aboriginal psychiatrist (Anishnawbe). From 1997-2005, she worked at Six Nations Mental Health Services, a community mental health clinic based on the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. She is both Co-Director of the Indigenous Health Research Development Program and Assistant Professor in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. She is a co-investigator on several initiatives funded through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) – Institute of Aboriginal Peoples Health including the National Network of Aboriginal Mental Health Research (NNAMHR) which she co-directs with Dr Laurence Kirmayer. In 2007, she was appointed to CIHR’s Governing Council. In 2008, she was appointed Chair of CIHR’s Knowledge Translation Advisory Committee. She was a member of the Advisory Group on Suicide Prevention (2002-2003) that developed a framework document for the Assembly of First Nations and First Nations and Inuit Health Branch to address the issue of First Nations youth suicide. From 2002-2005, she served as Deputy Chair of Health Canada’s Research Ethics Board and currently serves as Chair of the Drug Utilization Evaluation Advisory Committee, First Nations and Inuit Health Branch. In 2006, she was appointed as a Member of the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation’s Board of Directors. In 2007, she was appointed to the First Nations, Inuit and Metis Advisory Committee, part of the Mental Health Commission of Canada. She was a 1998 recipient of a National Aboriginal Achievement Award, recognizing career achievement in the category of medicine.