The School of Psychology has become one of the largest and most active Psychology departments in Britain, with an excellent reputation for teaching and research. We gained 23 out of 24 in the QAA Quality Assessment Review of teaching and a grade of 5* in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. Over £2.5 million of research grants and contracts are currently held.
The School's student population consists of about 450 undergraduates on our BSc single honours course; there are about 250 postgraduates who are engaged in professional training on courses in Clinical and Forensic Psychology, in research toward a PhD in Psychology. We have about 46 teaching staff, whose research and teaching interests cover all areas of contemporary psychology, and about 28 research staff supported by outside grants.
The School has a democratic but efficiently organised management structure which allows student participation in decision making. We try to provide all our students with a friendly and supportive social environment for their work as well as a high quality education.
The School is housed in two adjacent buildings at the centre of the campus: Frankland and Hills. Both buildings have been completely modernised to meet our particular needs and house purpose-designed research laboratories. The Hills building contains laboratories specially equipped for work in the cognition of vision, speech, action, neuropsychology, and rehabilitation. Further specialist research laboratories are located in the Frankland building: psychophysiology, psychophysics, visual perception, food and nutritional psychology, physiological psychology, psychopharmacology, social psychology and child development. We also have several rooms with closed-circuit television suitable for research. Specialist equipment includes: two 128-channel EEG/ERP laboratories, 2 laboratories for trans-cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), 5 eye trackers for measuring eye movements, robotic systems for motor control, 4 sets of motion analysis system. The School is also a major partner in the recently opened Birmingham University Imaging Centre (BUIC), which houses a research-based 3T fMRI scanner, along with additional specialist equipment for EEG/ eye and hand tracking, and TMS.
Excellent research opportunities are also provided by our links with local hospitals and clinics, local schools and nurseries, other University departments, industrial companies and departments of local and national government, both in this country and overseas. There are facilities for Erasmus exchanges with the Universities of Leuven (Belgium), Nijmegen (Netherlands), Copenhagen, Paris and Padova (Italy).
Besides the School’s own equipment and laboratories, many facilities in outside organisations can be used. There are also strong links with departments in our own and in other Divisions covering the arts, social, engineering and medical disciplines. Common interests include: functional brain imaging, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, cognitive neuropsychology, developmental psychology, forensic psychology, clinical psychology, consumer psychology, social psychology, the relations of behaviour to genetics, the actions of foods, hormones and drugs, sensory perception and behavioural neuroscience.
There are international research centres in the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre (for work in cognitive neuroscience), the Centre for Family and Forensic Psychology (for work in family psychology and forensic psychology), and the Cerebra Centre for Neuro-Genetic Disorders (for research into genetically-based cognitive and behaviour disorders).
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