Join us on Friday 13th November for the latest of our annual lectures on mental health, featuring guest speaker Professor Rachel Upthegrove, by completing the sign up form below.
Please register here to attend this free event, which is open to everyone.
The Monica Fooks Memorial Lecture was established in 2002 at Somerville College, in memory of Monica, the daughter and sister, respectively, of Jean and Carolyn Fooks, who were both students at Somerville. Monica studied at Edinburgh University and developed bipolar disorder, which led to her taking her own life in September 1994 at the age of 26. Monica’s parents, Geoffrey and Jean Fooks, gave Somerville the funds to set up the lectureship, with the specific aim of improving public awareness of mental illness and to encourage medical students to take more interest in psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder.
Rachel Upthegrove is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Director of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Oxford Health, and Chair of the NIHR Mental Health Translational Research Collaboration. Rachel trained in Medicine at the Royal Free Hospital, University of London and completed Psychiatry training in Birmingham. Her research focuses on the identification of novel treatments for early stages of schizophrenia, and she leads the UKRI funded Psychosis Immune Mechanism Stratified Medicine Study (PIMS), a collaborative multi-stage project investigating inflammatory mechanisms of psychosis. Her translational research includes NIHR funded Early Psychosis Informatics into Care (EPICare) platform. She is chief investigator and co-investigator on a number of RCTs for repurposed and targeted treatments. She was recognized in Kings Birthday Honours in 2024 for services to Mental Health Research and Life Sciences.