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About Us

Our work

This web-site describes the work of the Recovery Research Team at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) in Nottingham. The IMH is a partnership between the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. You may know some of the work the Recovery Research Team have led, such as:

  • forming the Recovery Research Network of 900 people from 50 countries with an interest in researching recovery
  • organising the Refocus on Recovery conferences, the world’s largest ongoing series of scientific conferences on recovery
  • creating the CHIME Framework identifying Connectedness, Hope, Identity, Meaning and Empowerment as key recovery processes
  • developing the REFOCUS intervention for mental health teams to increase their skills in supporting recovery
  • developing the Positive Psychotherapy for Psychosis intervention to improve wellbeing in people living with psychosis
  • running the RECOLLECT Study on Recovery Colleges

We also collaborate widely, on projects such as:

To learn more about the Recovery Research Team, see here

Mike Slade

The Recovery Research Team is led by Mike Slade. He is Professor of Mental Health Recovery and Social Inclusion at the University of Nottingham, based in the School of Health Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, and working at the Institute of Mental Health. His post is jointly funded with Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. Until 2015 he was Professor of Health Services Research at King’s College London and a Consultant Clinical Psychologist with South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Some of the research reported here was conducted by his team at King’s College London. For more information about Mike Slade, visit his staff profile or his listings on Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearcherID, Scopus or SciProfiles.

Recovery Research Team

NAMEPROJECTROLE
Ada HuiNEONAssistant Professor
Ashleigh CharlesPhD Student
Benjamin-Rose IngallEPOCHResearch Assistant
Catherine JohnPhD student
Chris NewbyStatistician
Emilia DeakinUNFOLDPhD Student
Felix LewandowskiPhD Student
Fiona NgEPOCHNIHR Advanced Fellow and Anne McLaren Fellow
Kara RimmerResearch Administrator
Katja MilnerMISTICPhD Student
Maria CasingcasingPhD Student
Merly McPhilbinRECOLLECTResearch Assistant
Mike SladeProfessor
Olamide TodowedeC-STACSResearch Fellow
Simran TakhiRECOLLECTResearch Assistant
Stefan Rennick EgglestoneNEONProgramme Coordinator
Yasmin AliNEONResearch Assistant
Yasu KoteraAssociate Professor

Collaborators

The team work with a range of organisations, because ‘if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together’. In the UK our collaborators include:

We also work with organisations in many other countries, including:

  • Australia (Monash University; Mind Australia)
  • Bulgaria (National Center of Public Health and Analyses)
  • Canada (McGill University; St Michael’s Hospital)
  • Denmark (Copenhagen University; Mental Health Centre Copenhagen)
  • Germany (Hamburg University; Ulm University)
  • Ghana (CBM International)
  • Hong Kong (Hong Kong University)
  • India (Quality Rights Gujarat)
  • Ireland (Mayo Recovery College)
  • Israel (Ben Gurion University of the Negev; Haifa University)
  • Italy (Consortium Oscar Romero)
  • Netherlands (Phrenos; VU University Amsterdam)
  • Norway (University College of Southeast Norway; Norwegian Resource Centre for Community Mental Health)
  • Portugal (Lisbon Institute for Global Mental Health)
  • Slovenia (University of Ljubljana)
  • Tanzania (Ifakara Health Institute)
  • Uganda (Butabika National Referral Hospital; Heartsounds Recovery College)
  • USA (Boston University; Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Centre; University of Massachusetts; Yale University)

And we work with international organisation, such as

  • Mental Health Europe
  • EUFAMI
  • Validity
  • World Health Organization

Getting references for our publications

There are three ways you can access the references of publications from the Recovery Research Team:

  1. We actively maintain our website researchintorecovery.com. We put references for all our papers on our News page, where you can filter by study to see all news from a particular study. News postings about all our papers are listed here, books here, and free downloads here. Additionally, for many of our larger studies we maintain a narrative about findings from the study including all study publications, e.g. the summary of findings for NEON is here.
  2. Google Scholar contains a list of all publications by individual researchers. For example, the Google Scholar page for Mike Slade is here.
  3. Most but not all members of the Recovery Research Team are in the School of Health Sciences, and you can search for their staff page including their publications here. For example, the staff page for Mike Slade is here.

Accessing the full text of our publications

There are several ways you can access the full text of our publications:

  1. We publish many of our papers as open access articles, i.e. free to download directly from the journal. To get to the journal you can follow the ‘Available here’ link from the News post for the paper – use the filters at the top of the News page to find papers from a specific study.
  2. PubMed and Europe PMC often contain full text versions of papers – search for the paper by title.
  3. The Nottingham Research Repository is the open access full text archive for University of Nottingham research, in which you can search for the title of articles.
  4. The above repository is indexed by search engines, so you can just e.g. Google the title of a specific paper (prefaced by ‘Nottingham Repository’ is best).
  5. Our free-to-download reports are here.
  6. If none of the above approaches work you can contact us here.

Doing a PhD with us

If you are generally interested in doing a PhD (e.g. at the University of Nottingham, in mental health etc.) then please contact BR-SRSH-mhs@exmail.nottingham.ac.uk. A list of supervisors in the School of Health Sciences is available here.

If you are specifically interested in doing a PhD with us (Recovery Research Team in the Institute of Mental Health) then unfortunately the first aspect to consider is funding. Doing a PhD is expensive! General details on University of Nottingham fees (which are in line with other UK universities) are given here (NB the PhD will be in the School of Health Sciences).

If you do not have funding, postgraduate funding options are listed here and we sometimes advertise contract research jobs with the possibility to do a PhD – our vacancies are always advertised on the University of Nottingham jobs site and on jobs.ac.uk.

If you do have funding, please send us your research CV, PhD plan, career goals and funding details. Our PhD supervision capacity is a limited resource, so only the strongest applicants (research experience and publications, PhD and career plans aligned with the Recovery Research Team, secured funding) are likely to end up doing a PhD with us.

Visiting us

We very much welcome visitors to our research group, especially visitors from other countries. Due to COVID-19 we have suspended visits during 2020 and 2021, but hope that we can resume hosting visits from colleagues in 2022. Most of our visitors come to learn about our work, and to support long-term research collaborations. If this might be of interest do contact us. Please note that the School of Health Sciences in which we are based does not take part in the Erasmus Scheme, so we cannot offer Erasmus internships (see here for more information about Erasmus and the University of Nottingham).

Working with us

If you are looking for paid employment with us then our vacancies are always advertised on the University of Nottingham jobs site and on jobs.ac.uk. If you are wanting a secondment from your existing job or un-paid work experience with us then feel free to contact us with your research CV. We would be unlikely to be able to offer anything to someone who cannot make a specific and relatively guaranteed time commitment so please also indicate your availability.

More generally, almost all research jobs offered by universities are advertised through jobs.ac.uk, but occasionally some jobs won’t be, for example due to administrative error, so regularly check recruitment pages for universities you might want to work at as well. Some organisations offering jobs that are closely connected to research might not use jobs.ac.uk, so it’s worth regularly checking the websites of relevant organisations including NHS Jobs as well as charities such as McPin Foundation or Wellcome. Jobs can also be found on website such as Indeed and LinkedIn, and some academics may tweet about jobs currently open in their research group.

Health research studies can be large and complex to deliver, and hence there are a wide range of research support jobs employing people to support research studies, but these might not always be mental health specific. You could look at the various regional Clinical Research Networks (CRNs) such as CRN East Midlands. Some research support jobs will turn up in universities as well. Research support jobs can provide you with useful experience of the UK health research system that can help in securing a research job in the future.

Consultancy

We provide a consultancy service to policy-making organisations and service-providers, advising on the best way to develop recovery-promoting mental health services and to implement evidence-based recovery-orientated practice. Do contact us for more information.

Training

Our expert team organises training courses in recovery, or can offer bespoke training for mental health systems, trusts or individual teams. Recent training topics have included REFOCUS, INSPIRE, positive psychotherapy, developing a recovery focus, outcome measurement, and managing innovation. Please contact us for further information.