Prof. Ulrike Schmidt King’s College London, UK

Prof Ulrike Schmidt, MD PhD FRCPsych, studied medicine at the University of Düsseldorf. Throughout, she was supported by the German National Scholarship Foundation, for distinction in her work. She came to the UK in 1981 on a one-year travel fellowship from the Foundation. She trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley... read moreHospital and obtained her PhD in eating disorders. She became a consultant in the Eating Disorders Unit at the Maudsley Hospital in 1998 and Professor of Eating Disorders at King’s College London (KCL) in 2006. Prof Schmidt is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Hilde Bruch Award for Outstanding Achievements in Eating Disorders Research and Treatment and a National Institute for Health Research Senior Investigator award for distinction in people-based research. She also recently received an NHS70 Women Leaders award in recognition of her contribution to the field of eating disorders. She is one of the developers of the multi-award winning FREED early intervention programme. Prof Schmidt has produced some 400 peer-reviewed papers and many other publications on eating disorders, including text books, chapters, patient manuals, and web-based treatment or training packages. A key focus of her research has been on experimental therapeutics, i.e. development of interventions as probes of disease mechanisms as well as tests of efficacy. This has included development of brief scalable psychological treatments for eating disorders and use of novel ‘brain-directed treatments’, such as non-invasive neuromodulation approaches.