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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. In recognition of this, he has now been awarded the Lundbeck Foundation’s diversity award – the LF Scientific Enrichment Prize 2024.

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.

Curiosity is important 

Professor Ebdrup describes himself as a medical doctor first, and a researcher second, which is why his research is patient-centric. 

To that end, one of the main objectives of CNSR is to pave the way for optimised and individualised treatment of schizophrenia.

“The patients are diverse, as are the symptoms of their mental illness. That’s why we need to meet them with openness and seek to understand them from a multidisciplinary perspective and from various human points of view,” says Ebdrup. 

“The premise for psychiatry should consequently be openness and curiosity and an intrinsic interest in other human beings. Some of the people I hire don’t necessarily know much about the medical discipline of psychiatry, but then they know a lot about mathematical modelling for example. And they often make observations that wouldn’t have occurred to the rest of us.

Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder with a myriad of clinical manifestations. Neurobiologically, schizophrenia is also a highly complex disorder, but one typical symptom is an altered sense of reality. Patients may also hear voices or have hallucinations, and these experiences are believed to be linked to disrupted signalling substances in the brain and to changes in brain structure.

Welcomes ‘quirky’ personalities

Ebdrup’s nomination for the prize was made by his research team on the grounds that “he has a special talent for bringing out our unique qualities, and has succeeded in creating a space with respect, open communication and room for error in which everyone feels confident sharing different ideas.”

The research team is made up of as many as 30 individuals. Besides medical doctors, psychologists, nurses and a secretary, it also counts engineers and molecular biologists, along with students of medicine, neuroscience, psychology and engineering. Together they are a mixed bunch, representing a wide age range and hailing from Denmark, other European countries, India and Australia. Just over half of them are women.

The prize nomination reveals that a special background or personality is an advantage for team candidates: 

“Bjørn Ebdrup’s preference for quirky and extraordinary personalities has led him to collaborate with and recruit talented specialists who belong to uncommon subcultures, represent diverse sexual orientations, and at times, researchers struggling personally with mental illness.”

And that diversity applies not only to composition of the research team, but also to the topics investigated and the methods and technologies employed. 

Examples of research projects include a study of clinical, cognitive and biological markers of schizophrenia risk, a trial of a therapy for Alzheimer’s disease to ease the symptoms that antipsychotics have no effect on, and a study of healthy 10-year-olds to identify early neurobiological signs of mental vulnerability.

Professor Ebdrup believes that because schizophrenia is a complex neurological disorder characterised by disturbances in the brain’s processing of sensory inputs, many different types of studies are needed. 

“We always make a virtue of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of clinical practice: the psychopathological assessment in which we take the patient’s history. On top of that, we have a barrage of screening methods that provide pointers to physiological and molecular biological mechanisms behind the patient’s condition. These range from blood tests to MR scans and other diagnostic imaging techniques to EEG measurement of electrical activity in the brain,” he explains. 

The question is naturally whether team diversity has a favourable influence on the research. 

“Ultimately, I think it will have a great impact. Because we’re not looking for one single explanation for what schizophrenia is. We’re looking for lots of different explanations. And I believe that diversity is the key to finding those explanations.”

Although Ebdrup has not made specific plans for his commitment to diversity in research, he does have a next step in mind: patient involvement. 

“Patients can provide a lot of valuable personal input, and their life experience and perspectives are worth their weight in gold, so we need them in our study design. Not because we think we should, but because I believe it may be of value to the research.”

About Scientific Enrichment Prize

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