Simon Blackwell Professional Activities
Other Professional Activities
Conference Organisation
I have been involved in the organization of a number of national and international CBT conferences. I am currently co-chair of the National Conference Programme Advisory Group for the British Association for Cognitive and Behavioural Psychotherapies (BABCP), which is the scientific committee responsible for organizing the scientific programme for the annual conference of the BABCP (the UK CBT organization; https://babcp.com/). The next conference is to be held in Manchester, 23rd - 26th July 2024 (https://babcp2024.org/). Previously I had been a member of the scientific committee since 2012, co-leading the ‘Basic Processes and Experimental Psychopathology’ stream.
I was co-chair of the scientific committee for the 10th World Congress of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies (WCCBT; https://wccbt2023.org/), held in Seoul, Korea, in June 2023. I took over this role of co-chair for the last period of preparation for the conference (from February 2023 onwards), overseeing evaluation of submissions and scheduling of the scientific programme. Previously I had been a Scientific Committee Chair for the 9th World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies, held in Berlin in July 2019, overseeing the open paper and poster submissions. I was also a member of the scientific committee for the 2021 European Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (EABCT) Annual Congress, held in Belfast in September 2021.
Editorial and Reviewing Work
I am currently an associate editor for the British Journal of Clinical Psychology, and on the editorial board for Behaviour Research and Therapy (since 2017). I was previously an associate editor for the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy from 2021- 2022, and on the editorial board for International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology from 2018 to 2019.
I was guest editor (with Thomas Heidenreich) of a special issue on the theme “CBT at the Crossroads” in the International Journal of Cognitive Therapy (2021), and guest editor (with Naomi Koerner) of a special issue on the topic of mental imagery in worry and generalized anxiety disorder, in Behaviour Research and Therapy (2021).
I have reviewed for > 50 different journals, including Lancet Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, Psychological Bulletin, Psychological Medicine, Clinical Psychology Review, Psychological Science, Clinical Psychological Science, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, and Nature Mental Health.
I have conducted reviews for a number of funding agencies, including the UK Medical Research Council, Research Foundation Flanders (FWO, Belgium), ZonMw (The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development), Austrian Science Fund (FWF), and Wellcome Trust.
Promotion of Open Science
A commitment to Open Science is integrated throughout my research. This includes pre-registration of all studies I lead on, and setting up my studies with a view to sharing data and analysis scripts, which I make routinely available via repositories such as the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/x53hy/). I also use open-source and license-free software (e.g. Java, PsychoPy) whenever possible. For example, I programmed the online intervention platform used in a recent study (https://osf.io/8mxda/) entirely using license-free software (Java, Javascript, MySQL) and made it available on the Open Science Framework. I was Academic Coordinator for the Reseach Improvement Strategy of the Mental Health Research and Treatment Center, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, coordinating its joining of the German Reproducibility Network. Currently I am a member of the newly-formed working group for open science in clinical psychology of the German Psychological Society (DGPs; see e.g., Fink-Lamotte et al., 2023).