Professor Andrew Forrester
Professor of Forensic Psychiatry, Cardiff University
Speaker's biography
Andrew is Professor of Forensic Psychiatry at Cardiff University, and a Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist with Swansea Bay University Health Board and Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. He is forensic lead at the National Centre for Mental Health, director of the Offender Health Research Network Cymru, Academic Secretary to the Faculty of Forensic Psychiatry, Royal College of Psychiatrists, and Editor in Chief of the SAGE journal Medicine, Science and the Law. He sits on the executive committees of the Forensic Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the British Academy of Forensic Sciences, the charity Crime in Mind and the British Medical Association’s Forensic and Secure Environments Committee. He is the former chair of the World Psychiatric Association’s prison mental health task-force, and a former member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Working Group on the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers. Andrew has worked as a Forensic Psychiatrist in prisons and other criminal justice settings for over 20 years. He has introduced and developed new services in these areas and written over 700 reports to the courts. His clinical and research interests relate to mental health conditions as they present in the criminal justice system, including prisons, courts, police custody, probation, and other places of detention, with a focus on vulnerability and marginalisation. He plays piano and managed to improve his Spanish during lockdown.
