About the Department

The buildings and facilities

Our purpose-built facility houses a lecture theatre, seminar rooms and teaching laboratories. Research and teaching facilities include small laboratory rooms for individual and small group practical work; visual perception and motor skills experimental laboratories; a room with a one-way vision screen and closed-circuit television for social psychology and for developmental psychology; state-of-the-art neuroscience facilities; including provision for brain imaging research and for neurophysical recording from individual cells. There are additional computer facilities for specialised project work, reading room facilities and a social space where refreshments may be taken.

Staff and students

The Department has over 30 full-time academic staff. In addition, staff from the Department's Doctor of Clinical Psychology course (D.Clin.Psy) and the Institute of Work Psychology also contribute to undergraduate teaching. In addition, several research staff have teaching responsibilities in the Department. There are approximately 150-190 undergraduate students reading Psychology in each of the three years.

Teaching and research

The Department has an excellent reputation for teaching and research. Over the past ten years the Department has received consistently high ratings in all national reviews of research excellence. In the recent Research Assessment Exercise the department ranked 6th in the UK in terms of Research Power (i.e., quality × quantity of research activity) and the RAE particularly commended the quality of the department’s research output in the areas of neuroscience and computational modelling. Research is closely integrated with teaching and the Department also received an "excellent" rating in a last review of teaching by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA).