Keynote Speakers

Keynote title: Shifting psychotherapy research from brands and categories to active ingredients

Ioana Alina Cristea is Assistant Professor at the Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences, University of Pavia, Italy and a Research Affiliate at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University, USA (METRICS). She is trained as a clinical psychologist and cognitive behavioral psychotherapist and has previously worked at Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, the Universities of Pisa and Padova, Italy, Stanford University, USA and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Between 2016 and 2017, she was a Fulbright Visiting Senior Scholar at Stanford University. Her main interests relate to issues of transparency, rigor, and waste in mental health and psychological research, using both quantitative and mixed approaches. More specifically, her work focuses on critically appraising the efficacy and safety of various psychological and pharmacological interventions for mental disorders, as well as documenting the systematic effects of diverse strains of bias, such as financial and non-financial conflicts of interest.

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Keynote title: Rethinking and Revisualising

Emily Holmes, PhD, DClinPsych is a Professor in Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Sweden and at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience.
Holmes received her degree in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, UK. She is also a clinician and completed a clinical psychology training doctorate at Royal Holloway University of London, and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in Cambridge, UK. She became Professor in 2010 at the University of Oxford. Holmes serves on the Board of Trustees of the research charity "MQ; transforming mental health”.
Holmes’ work as a clinical psychologist has fuelled her research questions. She is interested in psychological treatment innovation in mental health – both in creating new techniques and reaching more people. Under the wider umbrella of mental health science, her approach brings together psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, maths and more. Holmes’ research has demonstrated that mental imagery has a more powerful impact on emotion than its verbal counterpart. Her group is particularly interested in understanding and reducing intrusive memories (‘flashbacks’) after traumatic events, whether a severe car accident, traumatic childbirth, war, or events during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Keynote title: Bridging the gap between positive psychology and clinical interventions: Is it possible?

Full professor of Psychopathology at the Complutense University of Madrid. Carmelo has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University, and Visiting Porfessor at the University of California San Diego, San Diego State University, and Harvard University. He was President of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) (2013-2015). Interested in cognition and psychopathology, Carmelo has studied the role of positive emotions and positive interventions in emotional disorders.

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