At the ACAMH Awards 2025, Professor Frances Gardner CMG, Professor of Child and Family Psychology at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI), was awarded the ACAMH President’s Medal for Lifetime Contribution to Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Dr Gabriela Pavarini, Senior Research Fellow at DSPI, was named winner of the ACAMH Digital Innovation Award for Research on Digital Impact.
The ACAMH Awards celebrate excellence in evidence-based science, both in publication and practice, in the field of child and adolescent mental health. A nomination for an ACAMH Award is a prestigious recognition of those who are at the forefront of the advancement of child and adolescent mental health research, and practice.
When presenting the ACAMH President’s Medal, Professor Stephen Scott CBE, President of ACAMH and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, commended Prof Gardner for her pioneering work in highlighting the underlying interpersonal processes that can promote either challenging behaviour or harmony. Through rigorous testing and implementation of interventions across the world, her work has shown that physical and emotional violence, which affects a high proportion of children, can be reduced through parenting programmes.
Dr Pavarini received the ACAMH Digital Innovation Award for Research on Digital Impact in recognition of her paper, Cadê o Kauê? Co‐design and acceptability testing of a chat‐story aimed at enhancing youth participation in the promotion of mental health in Brazil, which was named the best paper on an information/data/IT/digital topic relating to child and adolescent mental health.
For a full list of winners and highly commended, including four other researchers from the University of Oxford, please read the ACAMH Awards 2025 announcement.
You can listen to Prof Gardner's keynote talk here: Researching parenting interventions over the decades - Keynote Speech ACAMH Awards 2025
