New Deputy Director of NIHR Maudsley BRC announced

Professor Grainne McAlonan

Professor Grainne McAlonan has been appointed as Deputy Director of the NIHR Maudsley BRC from May 2023 following a competitive call earlier this year. Professor McAlonan will take over from Professor Matthew Hotopf as interim BRC Director from this August. Professor Hotopf will start his new role as Executive Dean of the IoPPN from September. A process to appoint a substantive BRC director will start in the Autumn.

Professor McAlonan is Theme Lead for Child Mental Health and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. In December 2022, the NIHR Maudsley BRC received a £41m award taking us to November 2027. 

Professor Grainne McAlonan says, “Translating research into clinical practice has always been the focus of my career so I am delighted to have this opportunity to lead a research centre that is dedicated to this goal. We have a truly interdisciplinary team, working across mental health research and neuroscience, involving patients and public at every stage. This has enabled us to discover new and impactful intervention approaches to optimize mental health, based on a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind mental health difficulties. We will continue this strategy as we move forward.  

We are especially privileged to be based in South London, with its rich diversity of people from so many different backgrounds. It helps to make our research widely relevant.” 

Professor Grainne McAlonan is a clinical Professor of Translational Neuroscience at King’s College London. She is also a clinician in the National ADHD and Autism Service for Adults in the Maudsley Hospital and Research Lead for the Behavioural Developmental Psychiatry Clinical Academic Group, King’s Health Partners. Professor McAlonan is also a principal investigator within the pan-European Autism Innovative Medicine Studies-2-Trials (AIMS-2-Trials) the world’s largest grant for autism research.

Professor Sir Simon Wessely, Interim Executive Dean, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, says, “Congratulations to Grainne on her appointment to Deputy Director of the NIHR Maudsley BRC. We’re very proud of the work of our BRC which brings together researchers and clinicians from the IoPPN and South London and Maudsley to develop and trial innovative new approaches to transform patients' lives. Grainne has already done fantastic work as a theme and a cluster lead at the BRC and I am sure when she steps into the Interim Director role in the summer she will provide excellent support and leadership to our BRC clinicians and academics in this next stage of the Centre's development.” 

Grainne studied medicine at the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London and completed a PhD in behavioural neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.  After clinical and research posts in the UK, she worked for over a decade in the University of Hong Kong before returning to the IoPPN. 

Earlier this year, she gave her inaugural lecture on ‘Translating Neuroscience - across species, across development and into clinic’, and you can watch a video of this here.

 


Tags: Staff News -

By NIHR Maudsley BRC at 24 May 2023, 09:50 AM


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