Refocus on Recovery 2027 international conference

Scientific Advisory Board

The concept for our conference has been developed by a scientific advisory board, who bring a mixture of lived experience, practitioner, and academic perspectives and identities.

The scientific advisory board will decide which abstracts are given a platform at the conference, and allocate full (20 minute) and lightning (1 minute) presentation slots. At most 12 abstracts can be accepted for full presentations, and we always receive a much larger number of high quality abstracts.

Therefore, in their selection of who to provide a platform to, the scientific advisory board will seek to strike a balance between lived experience perspectives and empirical research studies, seeking to enable contributions from a diverse range of delegates, and prioritising voices that are less frequently heard at the conference.

Scientific advisory board members are:

Lisa Androulidakis (Habitus Collective)

Lisa is a Partner of Habitus Collective, a lived experience-led organisation specialising in peer support, co-production and engagement, and participatory research and evaluation. She has spent her career building and scaling peer support programmes internationally, including one of the largest cross-organisation peer support workforces in Canada, and she co-founded the International Peer Leadership Network, which connects peer and lived experience leaders across countries. Lisa has contributed to WHO guidance on peer support and supported the development of the 2025 WHO/Europe Roadmap on integrating lived experience practitioners. Her current work includes the Peer Research Academy, exploring the conditions that allow peer research to thrive.

Stine Bjerrum Moller (University of South Denmark / Syddansk Universitet)

Stine is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark and Head of Research at the Department of Multidisciplinary Traumatreatment in the Mental Health Services of the Region of Southern Denmark. Her research is driven by a strong commitment to integrating the patient perspective in both clinical care and mental health research.

Stine’s work focuses on how individuals recover from trauma and depression, and how psychological interventions can better support this process. She is particularly interested in anger, rumination, and emotional regulation as essential aspects of mental health. Central to her approach is the development of methods and tools that are meaningful for patients and relevant for real-world practice.

She collaborates closely with clinicians, service users, and researchers to bridge the gap between evidence-based treatments and everyday mental health care with the aim of promoting agency, and lives worth living.

Ed Day (University of Birmingham, UK)

Ed is a clinical academic who combines working as a consultant in an NHS alcohol and drug treatment service with research into clinical interventions and teaching at the University of Birmingham. He was appointed the National Recovery Champion by the Home Office in May 2019.

Mário César Rezende Andrade (Federal University of São João del-Rei / Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei)

Mario is a researcher and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ) in Minas Gerais, Brazil. His research focuses on mental health recovery, with a particular interest in adapting recovery-oriented practices and instruments to community mental health services (such as CAPS) in Portuguese-speaking contexts. Mário is dedicated to bridging the gap between Global North recovery frameworks and Brazilian mental health system. By contextualizing these concepts, his work aims to empower service users and support healthcare professionals across Latin America and the Global South, specifically in Brazil.

Hannah Slack (McPin Foundation)

Hannah is the Research and Involvement Manager at the McPin Foundation, a mental health research charity dedicated to improving mental health research through meaningful lived experience involvement. Hannah works with academic researchers to embed patient and public involvement throughout the research process, from developing involvement plans for funding proposals to supporting lived experience advisory groups and peer researchers.

Hannah is a University of Nottingham alumna, having completed her PhD in Psychology in 2023. She is a mixed methods researcher with expertise in psychological wellbeing research. Before joining McPin in 2026, she was a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London where she examined how expectations for social connection and changing social networks shape loneliness, belonging and wellbeing during the transition to university.

Hannah has also led research exploring lived experience perspectives on adverse childhood experience measurement tools, highlighting limitations in existing measures and making recommendations for future tool development.”

Emma Watson (Imroc)

Emma is the Programme Lead for research, publications and development at Imroc, and until recently was the Peer Support Lead at Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust. She started working as a peer worker in 2010 and has since worked in a variety of peer roles. Her PhD explored the experience of peer workers in the NHS, and she continues to be interested in how systems impose meaning on ‘lived experience’, and how this affects the individuals working within them. She is co-editor of peer support in mental health, the first book to be published on the subject in the UK. Outside of work, Emma loves reading, climbing, and chasing after her daughter Lola.

Fiona Ng (University of Nottingham, conference co-chair)

Fiona is a mental health researcher working at the Institute of Mental Health and School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham. She is the Principal Investigator on the Evaluating Positive Changes in Psychosis (EPOCH) Study which is developing a new digital intervention to support posttraumatic growth in psychosis. Her other research interests include mental health recovery, meaning making, digital interventions in mental health.

Stefan Rennick-Egglestone (University of Nottingham, conference co-chair)

Stefan is a mental health researcher working in the Institute of Mental Health (Nottingham, UK).  He was the co-ordinator for the NIHR-funded Narrative Experiences Online (NEON) study which has looked at how our stories of recovery from mental health problems can help others. Through NEON, Stefan has been deeply involved in work to examine how organisations can use mental health recovery stories in an ethical and responsible manner, and hence avoid misuse of what can be very sensitive material. Stefan brings his own lived experience of mental health problems to his work, and advocates for greater inclusion of lived experience perspectives in healthcare research and practice. He now co-leads the Institute of Mental Health Peer Research Academy, which has been commissioned by Wellcome to help peer researchers succeed. He has a PhD from the University of Nottingham, looking at how novel rehabilitation technologies can find a place in the homes of stroke survivors. He has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.