Bristol PhD students and academics from Professor Marcus Munafò’s and Dr Emma Robinson’s research groups were awarded six of 17 prizes for demonstrating excellence in clinical and non-clinical psychopharmacology and science communication at this year’s British Association for Psychopharmacology [BAP] summer meeting.

Fifteen members of the two research groups attended the annual meeting, which brings together around 400 psychopharmacology researchers from the UK and overseas, to present their work including two undergraduate students who presented research they had undertaken during placements. 

Dr Angela Attwood from the School of Experimental Psychology was awarded the 2013 Psychopharmacology Award for her work investigating new approaches to helping people with addiction. Professor Marcus Munafò from the School received the 2013 BAP/Cambridge Cognition Award for his work on developing new tasks to assess emotion recognition and Suzi Gage, a PhD student from the School of Social and Community Medicine was awarded the 2013 BAP Public Communication prize for her public engagement work including articles such as ‘Pot Luck – does smoking cannabis increase your chances of becoming psychotic?

Abigail Benn, a PhD student in the University’s School of Physiology and Pharmacology was awarded the Hannah Steinberg BAP Conference Bursary 2013 prize for her work investigating the underlying neurochemical processes which regulate recognition memory.  Both Abigail and Sarah Stuart, a fellow Physiology and Pharmacology PhD student, were presented with 2013 Poster prizes for their work. Abigail’s for her work investigating the underlying neurochemical processes which regulate recognition memory and Sarah’s for her work investigating the mechanisms of action of antidepressant drugs.