Congratulations to Dr Hisham Ziauddeen on being announced as Psychiatric Communicator of the Year in the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Annual Awards.

Hisham is a consultant psychiatrist in early intervention at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Foundation Trust and a Senior Research Associate working with Professor Paul Fletcher at the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science.

He is an experienced dabbler in public engagement as well as stand-up comedy and has successfully struck the difficult balance between following his passion and not earning fame or money from it. He is clearly a worthy winner having shown a wide range of communication skills within psychiatry, even using Virtual Reality work and comedy to demonstrate his creativity.

Since 2014, he has led an innovative teaching program – ‘Conversations with Experts by Experience’ – set up to give mental health researchers without a clinical background a chance to learn about mental disorders through people living with mental illness.