Researcher profile

Daniel Freeman

Daniel Freeman holds the Chair of Psychology in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and is a Professorial Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He is a consultant clinical psychologist in Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator, leads the Oxford Cognitive Approaches to Psychosis (O-CAP) research group, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Daniel is the co-lead of the Psychological Treatments theme of the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. He founded Oxford VR, a University of Oxford spin-out company developing virtual reality treatments for mental health disorders. His first degree was in natural sciences at the University of Cambridge, and he has completed doctorates in psychology and clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. He has held fellowships with the Wellcome Trust, Medical Research Council, and NIHR. He presented the BBC Radio 4 series A History of Delusions. The purpose of his work is to make significant advances in the understanding and treatment of mental health disorders, particularly the problem of delusions. Drawing on a variety of approaches, including epidemiological studies, psychological experiments, clinical trials, and a ground-breaking virtual reality laboratory, he has used the theoretical knowledge to develop carefully tested psychological treatments that produce large clinical effects. Notable achievements include the development of the most effective psychological treatment for persecutory delusions (the Feeling Safe Programme) and the pioneering of automated psychological treatment delivered in virtual reality (VR). He leads a clinical psychology research group comprising 40 researchers.