Professor Golam Khandaker is a world-leading psychiatrist and translational scientist whose pioneering research sits at the intersection of immunology, epidemiology, and clinical psychiatry. He holds the Chair in Psychiatry and Immunology at Bristol Medical School and leads the Immunopsychiatry Programme at the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, University of Bristol, UK. He is also Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist with the Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust and Co-Lead for the Mental Health Theme of the NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre.
An internationally recognised leader in immunopsychiatry, Professor Khandaker’s work seeks to identify the biological mechanisms underlying depression and psychotic disorders and to translate these insights into improved treatment, prediction, and prevention. His research integrates large-scale population cohort studies, genomic and proteomic analyses, genetic causal inference methods such as Mendelian randomization, and early-phase clinical trials of immunomodulatory therapies.
Professor Khandaker pioneered the application of population-based epidemiology and genetic causal inference to immunopsychiatry, providing influential evidence for a potentially causal role of inflammatory pathways – particularly interleukin-6 – in depression and schizophrenia. These discoveries have directly informed early-phase randomised controlled trials targeting inflammation, including studies of IL-6 receptor antagonism in depression and psychosis, and have led to the identification of immuno-metabolic subgroups with prognostic and therapeutic relevance. In predictive psychiatry, he has led the development of robust risk-prediction models that harness longitudinal electronic health record data to forecast clinical outcomes. Beyond individual disorders, his research is dedicated to uncovering shared biological mechanisms underlying psychiatric and cardiometabolic multimorbidity, addressing the substantial physical health burden experienced by people with serious mental illness.
A prolific scholar and influential voice in the field, Professor Khandaker is Lead Editor of the Textbook of Immunopsychiatry (Cambridge University Press) and serves on the editorial boards of leading psychiatry journals. He works closely with people with lived experience of mental illness, as well as charity and patient organisations, including the McPin Foundation, MQ: Transforming Mental Health (UK), and the Neuroimmune Foundation (USA).
