Jim van Os
Jim van Os is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at Maastricht University Medical Centre, Maastricht, The Netherlands, and Visiting Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK. He trained in Psychiatry in Casablanca (Morocco), Bordeaux (France) and finally at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley/Bethlem Royal Hospital in London (UK) and after his clinical training was awarded a three-year UK Medical Research Council Training Fellowship in Clinical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1995, he moved to Maastricht University Medical Centre.
He created the first User Research Centre in continental Europe (https://urc.mumc.maastrichtuniversity.nl/), where users of mental health services create solutions to deal with stigma, tapering psychotropic medications and empower people with lived experiences working in mental health services.
In 2015, together with colleagues Philippe Delespaul and Wilma Boevink, he initiated psychiatric reform in the Netherlands, resulting in pilots of ‘novel mental health services’ throughout the Netherlands, based on the creation of caring communities both locally and online.
In 2011, he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW); he appears on the 2014/2015 Thomson-Reuter Web of Science list of the world’s ‘most influential scientific minds’ of our time.
