Mar Rus-calafell PhD

Mar Rus-Calafell is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Digital Psychotherapy at the Faculty of Psychology of the Ruhr University Bochum and a licensed clinical psychologist.

Mar completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of the Balearic Islands and received her doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Barcelona, awarded with the highest possible grade (Summa Cum Laude) and the Best Thesis Award of that year. She complemented her PhD studies with a scholarship from the League of European Research Universities (LERU), to attend the distinguished training on the Development of Leadership Skills from Employment in Enterprise, Government, and Academia at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She then started as a post-doc and clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London (UK), where she coordinated a large clinical trial to test the efficacy of AVATAR therapy (a novel digital intervention for auditory hallucinations in psychosis).

In 2016, she was awarded the National Institute Health Research (NIHR) Independent Researcher Award to continue her clinical research in psychosis. In 2017, she started working as a clinical psychologist and research fellow with the Oxford-Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis (O-CAP) team at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford.   In 2020, she was awarded the prestigious Sofja Kovalevskaja Award (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Ministry of Education and Research, Germany) and she became the independent research group leader of the Young VOices Research and Interventions (YVORI) research group, which is based at the Mental Health Research and Treatment Centre (MHRTC, Ruhr-Universität Bochum). In 2021, Mar was selected for AcademiaNet – a database profile of excellent female researchers from all disciplines https://www.academia-net.org/profil/prof-dr-mar-rus-calafell/1802087.

Her research focus throughout her clinical and research career is the understanding and treatment of mental health disorders, and psychosis specifically, and the application of digital technologies to improve the assessment and treatment of these disorders. She is also and invited lecturer at other European universities, has been part of tribunals for PhD ceremonies, and is a reviewer of more than 20 journals and science organizations.