Professor Lisa Jones
Professor of Psychological Medicine
Mood Disorders Research Group
School Professors
email: lisa.jones@worc.ac.uk
tel: +44(0)1905 54 2801
Lisa Jones is Professor of Psychological Medicine in the Institute of Health & Society.
Lisa is the Principal Investigator of the Mood Disorders Research Group. The broad aims of the group are to investigate genetic and other factors that may contribute to the aetiology of bipolar disorder and other related mood and psychotic illnesses, such as schizoaffective disorder and postpartum psychosis.
Lisa qualified with a BSc (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Manchester in 1993. She went on to work as a Research Associate in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine (now part of Cardiff University). She commenced her PhD in Psychiatric Genetics in 1995 within the same department, and this was awarded in 1999 when she continued her work at Cardiff as a post-doctoral researcher. She moved to the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer in Psychiatry in 2000, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005. In October 2015 she took up a new Chair in Psychological Medicine at the University of Worcester.
Qualifications
2003 Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education - University of Birmingham.
1999 PhD Psychiatric Genetics - University of Wales College of Medicine.
1993 BSc (Hons) Psychology - University of Manchester.
Research
Lisa leads the Mood Disorders Research Group and currently has funding from two of the worlds leading medical research charities the Wellcome Trust and the Stanley Medical Research Institute. Her research interests lie in the aetiology of major mental illnesses (in particular, bipolar disorder, postpartum psychosis, major unipolar depression and psychosis). She has particular interests in enriching and refining phenotype definitions for molecular genetic studies, and in underlying cognitive and neuropsychological deficits.
In collaboration with colleagues at Cardiff University, she is a founding member and Principal Investigator of the Bipolar Disorder Research Network (BDRN), a group of researchers, clinicians and research participants in the UK involved in investigating the underlying causes of bipolar disorder. BDRN has recruited the largest sample of individuals with bipolar disorder in the world (currently, 6100 and counting) and has detailed and rich clinical data, psychological and social data, and genetic data on all participants.
The exciting and innovative new mood monitoring system True Colours is currently being offered to BDRN members, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Oxford as part of CoNBRIO Collaborative Network for Bipolar Research to Improve Outcomes. True Colours is an easy-to-use online technology that enables individuals to monitor their mood prospectively. The system will deliver groundbreaking data to help understand more about how mood symptoms present over time in individuals with bipolar disorder and how they are affected by changes in routines such as sleep.
Teaching
Lisa has wide experience of programme/module design, programme/module leadership, teaching, examination, and research supervision at undergraduate and postgraduate level to students of both science and medicine. Lisa set up an innovative and popular intercalated programme in Psychological Medicine for medical students, for which she was Programme Lead 2005-2015. This enables medical students who are particularly interested in psychiatry or any psychological aspects of medicine to spend a year studying the scientific aspects of psychological medicine in more detail and conduct their own research. To date, 51% of the graduates of the programme have gone on to publish their intercalation research in high quality peer-reviewed journals, at least 55% have presented their research at national and international conferences, and 14% have won national/international prizes for work completed during the intercalation year. Lisa is also very interested in student welfare, and has done a lot of work supporting medical students with mental health problems to successfully complete their degree and qualify as a doctor. She was delighted to win both the Head of Schools Prize and Head of Colleges Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2010, and in 2015 she won the Award for Outstanding Teaching in the College of Medical & Dental Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
Postgraduate supervision
Lisa enjoys supervising PhD students, and has successfully supervised many students. She is currently supervising Amy Perry who is conducting a prospective follow-up study of pregnant women with bipolar disorder to identify risk factors for postpartum episodes of illness. Lisa also has a lot of experience of mentoring PhD students, and of mentoring junior members of staff.
PhD project ideas
Emotional intelligence in bipolar disorder
Atopic diseases in bipolar disorder
Publications
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS SINCE 2009
Total publications 165; h-index 54; m-quotient 2.7; i10-index 123 (correct October 2015)
Jones L, Metcalf A, Gordon-Smith K, Forty L, Perry A, Lloyd J, Geddes JR, Goodwin GM, Jones I, Craddock N and Rogers RD (2105) The prevalence and distribution of gambling problems in bipolar disorder in the United Kingdom. British Journal of Psychiatry 207:328-33.
Gordon-Smith K, Forty L, Chan C, Knott S, Jones I, Craddock N and Jones LA (2015) Rapid cycling as a feature of bipolar disorder and comorbid migraine. Journal of Affective Disorders 175:320-4.
Di Florio A, Forty L, Gordon-Smith K, Heron J, Jones L, Craddock N and Jones I (2013) Perinatal episodes across the mood disorder spectrum. JAMA Psychiatry 70(2):168-75.
Psychiatric GWAS Consortium Bipolar Disorder Working Group (2011) Large-scale genome-wide association analysis of bipolar disorder identifies a new susceptibility locus near ODZ4. Nature Genetics 43(10):977-83.
Welcome Trust Case Control Consortium (2010) Genome-wide association study of copy number variation in 16,000 cases of eight common diseases and 3,000 shared controls. Nature 464(7289):713-20.
Craddock N, Jones L, Jones IR, Kirov G, Green EK, Grozeva D, Moskvina V, Nikolov I, Hamshere ML, Vukcevic D, Caesar S, Gordon-Smith K, Fraser C, Russell E, Norton N, Breen G, St Clair D, Collier DA, Young AH, Ferrier IN, Farmer A, McGuffin P, Holmans PA, Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC), Donnelly P, Owen ML and ODonovan MC (2010) Strong genetic evidence for a selective influence of GABAA receptors on a component of the bipolar disorder phenotype. Molecular Psychiatry 15(2):146-53.
Jones L, Scott J, Cooper C, Forty L, Smith KG, Sham P, Farmer A, McGuffin P, Craddock N and Jones I (2010)Cognitive style, personality and vulnerability to postnatal depression. British Journal of Psychiatry 196(3):200-5.
Forty L, Jones L, Jones I, Smith DJ, Caesar S, Fraser C, Gordon-Smith K, Hyde S and Craddock N (2009) Polarity at illness onset in bipolar I disorder and clinical course of illness. Bipolar Disorders 11(1):82-8.
External Responsibilities
External Responsibilities
External Examiner – BMedSci/MB BS – University of Nottingham (2015-2018).
Fitness to Practise Panel – University of Warwick Medical School.
Reviewer for the following grant giving bodies: Wellcome Trust; Medical Research Council (MRC); Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC); Department of Health; Cancer Research UK; Parkinson’s Disease Society; Medical Research Scotland; Parkinson’s UK.
Reviewer for the following journals: American Journal of Psychiatry; British Journal of Psychiatry; Bipolar Disorders; Psychiatry Research; Journal of Affective Disorders; European Psychiatry; Current Molecular Medicine; Comprehensive Psychiatry; Behavior Genetics; Genes, Brain & Behavior.