Kathryn Abel

Kathryn Abel is Professor of Psychological Medicine and Reproductive Psychiatry, Director and Founder of the Centre for Women’s Mental Health at the University of Manchester and co-Director of GM.Digital (formerly CAMHS.Digital) for Greater Manchester Mental Health where she is an honorary consultant psychiatrist. Her research interests include sex differences in mental illness; gender and mental health; perinatal mental and physical health; maternal condition and its effects on offspring cognitive development; parenting as a mediator of maternal effects and the outcomes of children of parents with mental illness. She also has an extensive programme of work with women in prisons who self-harm. Her research spans basic research using large data epidemiology and neuroscience techniques, co-development of interventions and randomised trials.

She has over 200 publications and a varied portfolio of public and patient communication of research including the use of film, animation, theatre and a longstanding collaboration with the SICK! Arts Festival. She has edited several books on women and mental health including Comprehensive Women’s Mental Health (2017 Cambridge University Press) and the lay reader: ‘The Female Mind’ (2017) for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. She is a member of the MQ Mental Health charity’s DataScience group. She holds a prestigious European Research Council Science Fellowship, is the NIHR National Lead for Mental Health and a National Institutes of Health Research Senior Investigator.