Bjørn Ebdrup
Scientific Enrichment Prize
Professor Bjørn Ebdrup has assembled a team of researchers representing a wide mix of skills and personalities. Each one of them contributes to a better understanding of patients with psychoses and helps pave the way for new treatments.
It is a well-known fact that managers have a way of recruiting clones of themselves. Professor Bjørn Ebdrup does something else – intentionally. As director of the Center for Neuropsychiatric Schizophrenia Research (CNSR), Mental Health Centre Glostrup, he aims to recruit people unlike himself or anyone else on the team. And not because he is expected to practise diversity.
“I just don’t see any other way of doing it. Dogmatic monodisciplinarity falls short when investigating complex disorders like schizophrenia. A very homogeneous team of researchers from the same field risks performing academic gymnastics with a lot of figures while losing sight of the goal for the patients,” he says.
Bjørn Ebdrup holds a clinical professorship at the University of Copenhagen, and is a consultant physician and research manager at CNSR (Center for Neuropsychiatric Schizophrenia Research at Mental Health Centre Glostrup)
He was born in Aalborg, Denmark in 1973, graduated in medicine from the University of Copenhagen in 2002, and gained his licence as a psychiatrist in 2017.
In 2021, Ebdrup was appointed professor of neurobiologically based treatment of psychosis at the University of Copenhagen. As a researcher, his main interest is early risk factors for schizophrenia, the significance of the brain's signalling substances in psychoses, and novel therapies.
Since 2023, he has headed up a clinical academic group (“KAG”) under Mental Health Services in the Capital Region of Denmark which works to integrate research, clinical practice and competence development across the Region’s mental health centres.
Interdisciplinary collaboration takes high priority within his research team – as does collaboration with other researchers nationally and internationally – in Germany, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands and Australia, for example.
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He is first and foremost a medical doctor and then a researcher, which is why his research is patient-centric.
