Kathryn Abel is Professor of Psychological Medicine and Reproductive Psychiatry, Founder and Director of the Centre for Women’s Mental Health at the University of Manchester and co-Director of CAMHS.Digital for Greater Manchester Mental Health where she is an honorary consultant psychiatrist. She has been the NIHR National Lead for Mental Health since 2016 and holds a prestigious European Research Council Consolidator Fellowship.
Her research is internationally renowned with over 200 publications and a focus on vulnerable women and their children. She has edited several books on women and mental health including Comprehensive Women’s Mental Health (2016 Cambridge University Press) and the ‘Female Mind’ (2017) for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Most prominent is her work using large data and infant neuroimaging to examine maternal effects child outcomes – particularly where parents have mental illness. She also has an extensive programme of work on self-harm in prisons. She led collaborative and highly cited work informing government about the trends and determinants of mental health and long covid during the pandemic.
She has a very varied portfolio of public and patent involvement in research, employing full time RAs who are experts by experience in large trials as well as in the development and design of research. She uses the arts broadly to disseminate findings using animation, film, theatre and has a longstanding collaboration with the SICK! Arts Festival. She is a member of several government, Department of Health and Ministry of Justice advisory groups and sits on the MQ Mental Health charity’s DataScience group.
