2010 ELECTION FOR OFFICERS AND COUNCIL

The following vacancies will arise on BAP Council in July:

President-elect
Professor Nicol Ferrier will become President

Meetings Secretary
Dr Alan Bateson will retire

Secretary for Clinical External Affairs
Professor Stephen Cooper resigned in 2009

Council seats
Post 3: Dr Sasha Gartside will retire
Post 4: Dr Peter Haddad will retire

The BAP aims to represent the interests of all psychopharmacologists (preclinical, clinical and industrial) regardless of gender or ethnic origins.

To achieve this it is essential that Members vote for a balanced Council membership to ensure appropriate input to Council meetings, the Summer Meeting programme and education portfolio. Members are strongly encouraged to consider the composition of Council when casting their votes and what expertise a candidate may bring, if elected.

Current Council composition (P = Preclinical Scientist; C = Clinical Scientist)

ELECTED OFFICERS
Gavin Reynolds: President (P)
Nicol Ferrier: President-elect (C)
Thomas Barnes: Past-President (C)
Catherine Harmer: Honorary Treasurer (P)
Alan Bateson: Meetings Secretary (P)
Hamish McAllister-Williams: Honorary General Secretary (C)
Naomi Fineberg: (Acting) Clinical Secretary for External Affairs (C)
Mohammed Shoaib: Preclinical Secretary for External Affairs (P)

ELECTED COUNCIL MEMBERS (4-YEAR TERM)
POST 1, for re-election in 2013: Val Curran (P)
POST 2, for re-election in 2013: Anne Jackson (P)
POST 3, for re-election in 2010: Sasha Gartside (P)
POST 4, for re-election in 2010: Peter Haddad (C)
POST 5, for re-election in 2011: Vacant until 2011
POST 6, for re-election in 2011: Andrea Malizia (C)
POST 7, for re-election in 2012: Paula Moran (P)
POST 8, for re-election in 2012: Carmine Pariante (C)

President-elect
The following nomination has been received and is valid

Nominee	Proposed by	Seconded by
Professor Barbara Sahakian	Professor Nicol Ferrier	Professor Gavin Reynolds

There were no further nominations for this post, so Professor Sahakian will be elected unopposed

Meetings Secretary
The following nomination has been received and is valid:

Nominee	Proposed by	Seconded by
Professor Jo Neill	Dr Alan Bateson	Professor Charles Marsden

There were no further nominations for this post, so Professor Neill will be elected unopposed

Secretary for Clinical External Affairs
The following nomination has been received and is valid:

Nominee	Proposed by	Seconded by
Professor Naomi Fineberg	Professor Trevor Robbins	Dr David Baldwin

There were no further nominations for this post, so Professor Fineberg will be elected unopposed

COUNCIL VACANCIES
The following nominations have been received and are valid (in alphabetical order):

Nominee	Proposed by	Seconded by
Dr Stephen Bazire	Professor Gavin Reynolds	Dr Peter Haddad
Dr Marcus Munafo	Professor David Nutt	Dr Peter Haddad
Dr Digby Quested	Professor Philip Cowen	Dr Catherine Harmer
Dr Elizabeth Tunbridge	Professor Paul Harrison	Professor Jo Neill

All nominees have provided a mini-biography and statement of intent

All FULL, HONORARY and RETIRED FULL MEMBERS of the British Association for Psychopharmacology are entitled to vote. Voting will be conducted online only via the Members’ page of the BAP website

Important:
1. The voting page may be accessed HERE
Please note: If you do not already have one, you will need to create an account.

2. You may vote for no more than TWO nominees for Council.

3. You should check the box/es against the names of the candidate/s of your choice.

4. The online voting facility will close at midnight on Monday, 19 July.

5. The results of the election will be announced by the BAP Honorary General Secretary at the 2010 Annual General Meeting (26 July, Harrogate International Centre).

THE NOMINEES

Dr Stephen Bazire
Proposer: Professor Gavin Reynolds ; Seconder: Dr Peter Haddad

Stephen Bazire is Chief Pharmacist, Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust and Honorary Professor, School of Pharmacy, University of East Anglia. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain in 2006, is a past Chairman and current Council member of College of Mental Health Pharmacy (formerly UK Psychiatric Pharmacy Group), ran the UKPPG website, and is a Visiting Fellow and External Examiner for the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham. He is author of the "Psychotropic Drug Directory", of which there have been 24 editions and over 470,000 copies sold, an external reviewer for the Ombudsman and was on the NICE Guidelines Development Group for Bipolar Disorder (2006). His special interests include user and carer information and education on medicines, and has been integral with the development of the www.choiceandmedication.org.uk website for service users and carers launched in October 2008. He is also active in implementing automation in mental health pharmacy and has just started the testing phase for a Trust-wide electronic prescribing project.

As a long-standing member of BAP I am very aware of the influence that BAP has in psychopharmacology, both in stimulating interactions between clinical psychiatry, pharmacy and basic pharmacology and in effective education initiatives across these disciplines. If elected I would be an active member of Council in all aspects of BAP to which I could contribute, not only seeking to promote mutually beneficial interactions between the College of Mental Health Pharmacy and BAP but also developing the role the BAP is taking in education both within, and beyond, the psychopharmacology community in supporting and informing users, carers and the interested public about the vital role of medicines in managing mental health problems.

Dr Marcus Munafo
Proposer: Professor David Nutt; Seconder: Dr Catherine Harmer

Dr Munafò was an undergraduate at Oxford, before moving to Southampton to complete his MSc and PhD, after which he returned to Oxford as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology. In 2004-2005 he spent 6 months as a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, taking up a lectureship in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the Bristol in 2005. He is currently Reader in Biological Psychology and leads the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group, and the Psychopharmacology Research Network.

Ongoing research interests are in the integration of multiple perspectives to understand individual differences in smoking behaviour and, in particular, smoking cessation. This has included substantial work on smoking cessation pharmacogenetics, as well as the study of behavioural and neuroimaging correlates of smoking behaviour. He recently contributed material on the genetics of smoking behaviour and smoking cessation pharmacogenetics to the forthcoming Surgeon General’s Report on tobacco-related disease.

He has been a member of the BAP for several years, and has taught on the BAP substance misuse module. These training initiatives, and the support it provides for student and trainee members, are a particular strength of the BAP, as is the quality of the annual meetings and the journal. He has always enjoyed the informal yet stimulating environment of the annual meetings, which allow researchers at all levels, across preclinical and clinical research, to communicate and share ideas.

If elected, I will work to further extend the reach of BAP into psychology and behavioural science. In my own work, I have developed extremely fruitful collaborations with other psychologists who have developed highly sophisticated measures of cognitive constructs, but lack the expertise to probe these with pharmacological challenges. This interface between psychology and pharmacology is a real strength of the BAP, which I would hope to promote more widely still. I would also be keen to extend the BAP’s public engagement efforts, as part of existing education and training activities.

Dr Digby Quested
Proposer: Professor Philip Cowen; Seconder: Dr Catherine Harmer

I trained in Psychiatry on the Charing Cross and Westminster rotation and at the Maudsley Hospital. I spent a year as a research fellow carrying out an original epidemiological study into schizophrenia and then worked on a PET scanning study with Peter Liddle and Phil McGuire investigating regional brain activity in formal thought disorder. In 1995 I joined Prof. Phil Cowen as a research psychiatrist in the Psychopharmacology Unit in Oxford, working on serotonin subtypes in relation to SSRI treatment and possible genetic contributions to 5-HT2C function as well as melatonin studies. I was appointed to a consultant post in Oxford in late 1997 and continued psychopharmacological research, completing my MD in 2003. I then collaborated with the Hammersmith PET Unit on schizophrenia studies with Paul Grasby and became CI of EPILUX in Oxford, both an on-going gene/environment study into schizophrenia aetiology and a collaborating centre with Hugh Gurling at UCL, most recently contributing samples to the Int. Schizophrenia Consortium dataset.
My current research interests include the role of circadian rhythm/sleep abnormalities and melatonin in bipolar disorder including a collaboration with John Geddes - MIAMI-UK, a trial of melatonin in acute mania, funded by NIHR.

I am involved in training as College Tutor and MRCPsych course organiser in Oxford and encourage junior psychiatrists participation in research, both with a research forum and as Trust academic lead for the clinical fellows. If elected to the BAP Council I would work to promote involvement of trainees in the association and related research. In addition, as an executive committee member of the SE Div of the Royal College, I have actively promoted trainee research presentations in meetings and we are interested in coordinating meetings with a psychopharmacological focus, and possible mutually beneficial objectives. With current risks to mental health funding, a focus on improving cost-effective drug treatment of mental illness and related clinical expertise in their use has become even more important.

Dr Elizabeth Tunbridge
Proposer: Professor Paul Harrison; Seconder: Professor Jo Neill

I am an enthusiastic supporter of the BAP and have attended and presented at annual meetings since the beginning of my DPhil. I have always found the BAP to be extremely welcoming and supportive of young scientists and value the forum that it provides for interactions between preclinical and clinical psychopharmacology researchers.

I graduated with a BSc in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Bath in 2000, having gained experience of research during a placement year at SmithKline Beecham. I then completed the Wellcome 4-year PhD Programme in Neuroscience (consisting of an MSc followed by a DPhil) at the University of Oxford. Since obtaining my DPhil, I have continued my research at the National Institute of Mental Health, US, and in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, where I am currently a Royal Society Research Fellow. I am a proud recipient of the both the BAP Wyeth Junior Award for Preclinical Psychopharmacology and the BAP Clinical Poster Prize.

My research aims to understand the role of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene in brain function and its dysfunction in psychiatric disorders using a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach. I focus primarily on measuring behavioural, neurochemical, molecular and electrophysiological parameters in animal models, but also examine gene and protein expression in post-mortem human brain and, most recently, am involved in a study of the effect of COMT inhibition on cognitive and emotional processing in human volunteers.

I think that one of the greatest strengths of the BAP is its diverse membership (preclinical and clinical; academia and industry), which makes it well-placed to help facilitate the translation of discoveries in basic science into clinical advances and, conversely, to ensure that preclinical research is informed by clinical practice. I am keen to support the BAP in all its endeavours, in particular its important roles in fostering multidisciplinary research and encouraging young scientists and clinicians to pursue a career in psychopharmacology research.

CAST YOUR VOTE HERE