The neurobiology of violence: implications for prevention and treatment

Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 October 2007
Organised by Professor Sheilagh Hodgins and Dr Essi Viding

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Professor Mark Dadds (Speaker)
Mark Dadds is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia, and Senior Research Fellow of the National Health and Medical research Council of Australia. He was previously Co-Director of the Griffith Adolescent Forensic Assessment and Treatment Centre, and Director of Research in the School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University. He directs several national intervention programs for children, youth, and their families, at risk for mental health problems. These programmes have been implemented in each state in Australia and in Canada, the USA, Belgium, and Holland. In the last decade he has been awarded over $1,000,000 in research funding for his work in clinical child and family mental health. He has been National President of the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy, Director of Research for the Abused Child Trust of Queensland, and a recipient of several awards including an Early Career Award from the Division of Scientific Affairs of the Australian Psychological Society and a Violence Prevention Award for the Federal Government via the Institute of Criminology. He has authored 4 books and over 100 papers on child and family psychology. In the last few years he has given invited keynote addresses to international conferences in Mexico, Canada, the UK, the USA, Denmark, Hungary, Austria, and Australia, including multiple invitations to the World Congress of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies. He has won the Australian Psychological Society's awards for Early Career Research in 1991 nd in 2005 the Ian Matthew Campbell Award for excellence in Clinical Psychology.

Professor Conor Duggan (Speaker)
Conor Duggan is Professor of Forensic Mental Health at the University of Nottingham and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at a Medium Secure Unit. His research interests are treatment needs in personality disordered offenders, their long-term course and the neuropsychological basis of psychopathy. He is especially interested on (a) how routine clinical services can directly inform the research agenda and (b) how forensic mental health relates to its satellite disciplines.  He is Editor of the Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Psychology and currently chairs a NICE Guideline Committee on the treatment of Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Professor Sheilagh Hodgins (Organiser)
Sheilagh Hodgins is Professor and Head of the Forensic Mental Health Science Department at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. She has authroed numerous papers, book chapters, and books focusing on antisocial, violent, and criminal behaviours among persons with mental disorders. Currently, she is conducting investigations that aim to identify the causal mechanisms leading to early-onset antisocial behaviour that remains stable over the life-spand among persons who develop schizophrenia, studies of factors that maintain these unwanted behaviours, and treatments to reduce violence. In addition, she is undertaking studies of the neurobiological abnormalities associated with persistent violent offending.

Professor Rolf Loeber (Speaker)
Rolf Loeber, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, and Professor of Psychology, and Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., and Professor of Juvenile Delinquency and Social Development at the Free University, Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is Co-director of the Life History Program and is principal investigator of three longitudinal studies, the Pittsburgh Youth Study, the Developmental Trends Study, and the Pittsburgh Girls Study. He has published widely in the fields of juvenile antisocial behavior and delinquency, substance use, and mental health problems.

Professor James McGuire (Speaker)
James McGuire is Professor of Forensic Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool, UK, where he is Director of Studies for the Doctor of Clinical Psychology programme and also holds an honorary post as consultant clinical psychologist in Mersey Care NHS Trust. As a chartered forensic and clinical psychologist he has carried out psycho-legal work involving assessment of offenders for courts, for hearings of the Mental Health Review Tribunal and for the Criminal Cases Review Commission. He worked for some years in a high security hospital and has conducted research in probation services, prisons, and other settings on aspects of psychosocial interventions with offenders; and has written or edited 14 books and numerous other publications on this and related issues. In addition he has been involved in a range of consultative work with criminal justice agencies in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Romania, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong.

Professor Christopher Patrick (Speaker)
Christopher J Patrick is Starke R Hathaway Distinguished Professor and Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1987, where he completed his dissertation entitled "The validity of lie detection with criminal psychopaths." He has published extensively in the areas of psychopathy, antisocial behavior, and substance use/abuse; his other research interests include emotion, personality, psychophysiology, and cognitive neuroscience. Dr. Patrick is President of the Society for Scientific Study of Psychopathy and a recipient of Distinguished Early Career Contribution awards from the American Psychological Association (1995) and the Society for Psychophysiological Research (1993). He is currently a Consulting Editor for Psychological Assessment and is a former Associate Editor of Psychophysiology.

Sir Michael Rutter FRS (Chair)
Michael Rutter is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London.  Previously he established the MRC Child Psychiatry Unit and the MRC Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, being honorary director of both until his retirement in 1998.  Currently he is clinical vice president of the Academy of Medical Sciences; he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987, and a foreign member of the US Institute of Medicine in 1988.  His research covers a diverse range of topics including antisocial behaviour, gene-environment interplay, the use of natural experiments to identify environmental causes of disease, autism, epidemiology and longitudinal studies.  He has published over 40 books and over 400 scientific papers.

Dr Essi Viding (Organiser)
Dr Essi Viding did her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, London and is currently at the faculty of both, University College London Psychology Department and Institute of Psychiatry Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre. Her research combines cognitive experimental measures, twin model-fitting, brain imaging, and genotyping to study different developmental pathways to persistent antisocial behaviour.