Joining the Wolfson Institute means that you’ll be taught by experts in their fields who will share their knowledge and inspire you with their passion and innovation.
Bridget Escolme is Professor of Theatre and Performance, and Director of Student Support in the Department of Drama. Bridget has worked as a director, performer, dramaturge and as a theatre and education practitioner. She co-convenes and teaches on the MSc in Creative Arts and Mental Health. Her approach to teaching is practical and collaborative: as well as making theatre with students to explore questions of the cultural politics of mental health and the performance of the past, she uses theatre practice to access historiography and cultural theory.
Professor Escolme’s research focuses on performance and mental health, and the history of emotions; theatre costume; and early modern drama in performance, and theatre audiences.
Dr Maria Grazia Turri is Lecturer and Co-director of the MSc Creative Arts and Mental Health. She is a psychiatrist, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, theatre scholar and practitioner. Following medical school, Maria trained in psychiatry and psychotherapy before working as a psychiatrist in the NHS for 15 years.
She also has a PhD in Drama and her research focuses on understanding processes of identification in theatre through psychoanalytic theory. She teaches on psychoanalysis, theatre history and theories, and the intersection between psychiatry and the arts.
Dr Mark Freestone is Reader in Mental Health, Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes. He works mainly in the field of forensic mental health, conducting research into the efficacy of treatments for offenders. He is also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at East London NHS Foundation Trust and a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He has also consulted on forensic mental health issues for NHS England and recently the BBC America drama series Killing Eve.
In his book, ‘Making a Psychopath’, published in late 2020, Mark shares his insight into seven of the most dangerous minds that he has encountered during his career.
Dr Freestone’s work considers the epidemiology of violence; outcomes research in mental health services; causal inference networks for violence risk management; clinical sub-types of personality disorder and psychopathy; substance misuse as a risk factor for violence; and patterns of service use by young men in the UK. His current research focuses on the understanding of causal mechanisms using advanced statistical modelling, and the effectiveness of psychosocial interventions for offenders with personality disorder.
Dr Celia Taylor is a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist and is Lead Clinician and Head of Service at the East London NHS Foundation Trust. She is also Lead Clinician at Millfields Medium Secure Personality Disorder Unit. She works with the London Pathways Partnership (LPP) to manage personality disorder units in HMP Belmarsh and HMP Swaleside.
Dr Hannah Jones is the Joint Programme Director for Forensic Psychology and Mental Health and a Lecturer in Forensic Mental Health. She is a chartered Forensic Psychologist and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS).
Her doctoral research focused on the link between childhood experiences, personality and parenting behaviour and her current research interests cover personality pathology, child maltreatment and offending behaviour, as well as societal concepts of punishment and rehabilitation. She frequently works as an expert witness across the Criminal Justice System and has close links with the Offender Personality Disorder Pathway across London.
Dr Kingsley Norton has been an NHS Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy, Clinical Director of Henderson Hospital and Head of Ealing Psychotherapy Services. In addition to numerous publications, he has been responsible for producing a range of training materials related to personality disorders.
Andrea Palinski is joint programme lead for the MSc Mental Health: Cultural Psychology and Psychiatry. She worked as a clinical case manager for mentally ill adolescents and adults for several years in the USA before moving to the UK. Here, Andrea was appointed lead of the Cultural Consultation Service (CCS) King’s Fund Project in the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, which delivered services to the adult mental health teams within the Trust. Andrea was also involved with the delivery of individual organisational consultancy.
Later, Andrea became Team Leader of a CCS based at the Wolfson Institute’s Centre for Psychiatry, that provided a multi-level service involving organisational, team based and individual clinical cultural consultation, and operated as a tertiary mental health service for adult community mental health teams (CMHTs) within the East London NHS Trust.
Her current research is focused on inequalities in mental health and the role of shared narratives in the intercultural clinical encounter with a focus on the factors and systems which facilitate or impede the construction of these narratives.
Dr Heidrun Brun is the Programme Director for MSc Mental Health: Psychological Therapies and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Psychiatry.
A psychologist by training, Heidrun studied in Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands, before returning to Germany to orchestrate a project on neural and psychological correlates of phonological categories, along with teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Dr Bien’s areas of expertise include Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental Research, Distance Learning in Higher Education, and Psycholinguistics.
Dr Theodora Dallas is Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society (BPS) and a full member of the Division of Health Psychology (DHP). She is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Lecturer in Mental Health in the Centre for Psychiatry. Her teaching experience includes a number of applied areas, such as counselling, mental health, health psychology and wellbeing, research methods, individual differences and social psychology.
Her PhD research explored factors that contribute to patient satisfaction in two European health care systems. This found that the quality of the doctor-patient relationship was the most important determinant of patient satisfaction and medical adherence.
Simon Dein is Honorary Professor at Queen Mary, he is a Consultant Psychiatrist, who currently works for South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust. A Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, his clinical expertise includes the treatment of depression, anxiety, panic disorder, OCD, bipolar and phobias and fears. He also has an interest in the management of psychological disorders in patients with physical illness, particularly cancer, diabetes and arthritis.
Professor Dein has published extensively around his research interests in religion and health among Hasidic Jews, Evangelical Christians and Sunni Muslims.
Professor McCoy is a qualified medical doctor who has worked in the UK and South Africa. He spent ten years in a rural hospital and in public health and health systems development in South Africa before returning to the UK. He has since worked in the NHS, academia and for a number of NGOs and charities.
David is Director of Global Health taught programmes, responsible for the delivery of the MSc programmes and teaches across a range of subject areas including maternal health, global health governance, health systems policy, disease management, and the social determinants of health.
Professor McCoys current research interests focus on global health governance and the political economy of health in the UK and Africa. Most recently he has published extensively about Covid-19 and governments’ response to the pandemic, and environmental issues, including global warming.
Find out more about our academic and research staff.