Jan Scott

Jan Scott is a Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Newcastle, and a visiting professor at the Brain and Mind Centre at The University of Sydney and NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. She is an Honorary Professor at the Centre for Affective Disorders at IPPN (formerly the Institute of Psychiatry) in London and a Distinguished Founding Fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. 

Professor Scott trained in psychiatry in Newcastle upon Tyne and was then a professor in Glasgow and the Institute of Psychiatry in London, before returning to Newcastle. Professor Scott also held visiting academic posts with Aaron Beck at Penn State University in Philadelphia, Eugene Paykel at Cambridge University, and Eduard Vieta in Barcelona and was also awarded the RCPsych travelling scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She is an invited professor at Diderot University in Paris and also a 'Science without Borders' Fellow which allows her to work at FESP in Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre in Brazil. 

Professor Scott's early research career focused on the development of psychological therapies, such as CBT, that could be combined with medications to improve the quality of life and clinical outcomes of individuals with difficult-to-treat chronic depression, bipolar disorders, and/or psychosis. She also developed an interest in the application of health belief models to clinical psychiatry, as a means to explore engagement with clinical services and to predict likelihood or adherence with treatments. 

In recent times, she has focused her research on emerging mood disorders, examining developmental trajectories and risk syndromes for bipolarity and the application of clinical staging models to mental health. This work examines trans-diagnostic risk factors for the development of long-term mental disorders and also the potential role of psychological interventions that target cognitive, emotional and circadian regulation, such as interventions that target rumination, mood instability, delayed sleep phase and activation levels. This work is undertaken in collaboration with colleagues in France, Norway, Brazil and Australia.