Professor Margaret Barry  NUI Galway

Margaret M. Barry, Ph.D., holds the Established Chair in Health Promotion and Public Health and is Head of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion Research at the National University of Ireland Galway. Professor Barry has published widely in health promotion and works closely with policymakers and practitioners on the development, implementation and evaluation of mental health promotion interventions and policies at national and international level.   

Professor Siobhain O’Neill Ulster University

Professor of Mental Health Sciences. Is a member of the World Mental Health Survey Consortium, and she sits on the Board of Directors, and advisory boards of several counselling and suicide prevention services. She has approximately  200 academic and research papers, including numerous studies of mental health and suicide in Northern Ireland.  She regularly write opinion pieces and contribute to media items on mental health and suicide prevention. In September 2019 co-hosted and co-chaired the scientific committee of the International Association for Suicide Prevention's, 30th World Congress in her home city, Derry.   Her current research programmes focus on ZeroSuicide in health services in NI, mental health and suicide prevention in schools and colleges, childhood adversities and trauma informed practice, and the transgenerational transmission of trauma.

Dr Aileen O’Reilly Jigsaw

Aileen is  a research psychologist with an interest in carrying out clinical and applied research. She currently work as Research Manager at Jigsaw - The National Centre for Youth Mental health, where her position focuses on delivering robust research to increase our collective understanding of youth mental health, and on providing evaluation evidence to better inform service delivery. She is a Co-investigator on the second My World Survey, which was published in 2019, and an adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology, UCD where she  currently co-supervises a PhD Student as part of the YOULEAD Doctoral Programme.

Professor Barbara Dooley – UCD

Barbara Dooley is currently Dean of Graduate Studies & Deputy Registrar in UCD. She also lectures in the UCD School of Psychology and was Director of Research for Headstrong - The National Centre for Youth Mental Health form 2007-2016. She produced a report, http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/MyWorldSurvey.pdf which studied the mental health of young people in Ireland. The My World Study is the first national study of youth mental health in Ireland. The report presents the findings of a very large sample of young people (N> 14,000) aged 12-25 years looking at both the risk and the protective factors.

Claudette Pretorius UCD.

Claudette is undertaking a PhD with University College Dublin. Her PhD project investigates the online help-seeking behaviours of young people using the Internet for mental health support. Claudette is also a member of HCI@UCD and organising member of the HCI@UCD seminar series. She received an MA in Counselling Psychology form Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University.  Claudette also earned a BA (Hons) in Psychology from the University of South Africa. 

Prof. Cathy Creswell, University of Oxford.

Professor of Clinical Psychology, NIHR Research Professor, Honorary Consultant clinical Psychologist (Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust).  Her research mainly focuses on the development, maintenance and treatment of anxiety disorders in children and young people. Hert team applies a broad range of methods (including experimental, longitudinal, clinical trial and qualitative methods and systematic reviews)  with children, young people and families in both community and clinical settings, with the ultimate aim of improving access to and outcomes from psychological treatments for these common conditions.

Professor Max Birchwood University of Warwick

Max Birchwood pioneered the concept and practice of early intervention in psychosis in the UK and internationally and opened the UK's first Early Intervention in Psychosis service in 1994, informed by his concept of the 'critical period' in psychosis, which he translated into the mental health policy framework for the UK government as part of the NHS 'National Plan'. The service has been replicated with over 140 teams across the country and many internationally. His research on delays in pathways to these services informed the current wait time standards for early psychosis teams. He leads the national evaluation of these services through the NIHR National EDEN and SUPEREDEN programme grants. Max was given the Richard Wyatt award for 'outstanding contribution to early psychosis research and treatment', by the IEPA ( www.iepa.org.au ). He went on to apply this model to the spectrum of mental health problems affecting youth and was instrumental in developing the Birmingham 0-25yrs service framework combining CAMHS and young adult services ( currently operated by 'Forward Thinking Birmingham) and led the evaluation of this service. He has worked with commissioners in Shropshire and South staffs and Gloucestershire in designing and commissioning similar services and chairs the stakeholder group. The 0-25 framework has been developed now in Coventry, Norfolk, Liverpool, Somerset with further services in the pipeline. He has undertaken leading edge research into the application of CBT to psychosis: his RCTs in acute psychosis (1996; 2000), in reducing harmful compliance with command hallucinations (2004,2013), and in high social disability in early psychosis (2018) and collaborative RCTs in high risk psychosis (2012), are regarded as breakthrough trials and have been incorporated into UK NICE guidelines for schizophrenia. He has also undertaken extensive work developing the cognitive model of 'voices' , particularly the role of appraisals of voices' power and their role in driving affective dysregulation and compliance with command hallucinations. Max heads the mental health theme of the NIHR CLAHRC West Midlands (2014-2019). Max was a member of the NICE guideline development group for schizophrenia in children and young people (2013) and adults (2014). He has published over 220 papers with a Google Scholar H-index of 73.

Dr Tony Bates

Dr Tony Bates is a Clinical Psychologist. He was Head of Psychology for 30 years in St James’s Hospital Dublin and established and directed the MSc Cognitive Psychotherapy in TCD until 2006. He founded Jigsaw (The National Centre for Youth Mental Health) in 2006 to serve young people and their mental health needs. He was CEO until his retirement in 2018. Tony has been active in shaping and writing government policy since 2006. He was made honorary Professor of Psychology in UCD in September 2018 as a tribute to his contribution to the field. He trained as a mindfulness teacher in University of North Wales, Bangor in 2001 and has been active since in disseminating Mindfulness in Ireland. Tony now lives on a cliff outside Grange, north of Sligo, where he writes, consults and looks after over 100 wild birds, a wild fox, a badger and a tribe of wild rabbits. Father of three, grandfather of four.