As part of winning the award, Dr Sharpe, Emeritus Professor of Psychological Medicine in the Oxford Department of Psychiatry, will present the Adolf Meyer Award Lecture at the American Psychiatric Association conference in San Francisco in May.
In the lecture, entitled ‘Can psychiatry make medicine better: a tale of three trials’, he will summarise several decades of research he has led into the contribution psychiatry can make to medical care including three major clinical trials.
Dr Sharpe said:
"I am honoured to receive this highly prestigious research award. I hope it will help to raises the profile of research done in the Oxford University Department of Psychiatry in the USA. I am also especially pleased that the award is named after a persons whose work was an inspiration to our Department’s founding chair, Michael Gelder."
The award, established in 1957, is named after a Swiss-born American psychiatrist who rose to prominence as the first psychiatrist-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was one of psychiatry’s most influential figures in the first half of the twentieth century. Meyer’s legacy includes his idea of psychobiology, an approach to psychiatry which integrates the psychological and biological study of human beings, and his empirical non-dogmatic approach.
Previous winners of this award include Aaron T Beck, Robin Murray, Michael Rutter, David Goldberg and Daniel Weinberger.