Dr Tim Nicholson

Dr Tim Nicholson is a Clinical Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London. He is also an Honorary consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. He runs a specialist clinic for Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) at the Maudsley Hospital.

Tim trained briefly in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery at Queen square before training fully in psychiatry and then neuropsychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital / IoPPN in South London. He did his PhD, funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC), in FND looking at the role of stressful life events that might precipitate episodes of paralysis and used other methods such as neuroimaging (both structural and functional MRI scans) and neuropsychological testing to investigate the possible mechanisms of FND. He was subsequently awarded a National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Clinician Scientist fellowship to investigate transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) as a treatment for FND causing limb paralysis/weakness, with mechanistic and outcome measure work.

He leads the largest international project on FND – the FND Core Outcome Measures (FND-COM) project which includes over 40 multidisciplinary experts from 14 countries. He is on the medical advisory board for FND Hope and FND Action and is a founder member and on the conference organising committee of the FND Society.

He has had a longstanding interest in the biological causes of psychiatric symptoms, including immunopsychiatry and recent focus in the full spectrum of neuropsychiatric symptoms resulting from COVID-19. He is on the executive committee of the faculty of neuropsychiatry of the RCPsych, the British Neuropsychiatry Association and the council of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. He is director of the MSc in Clinical Neuropsychiatry at the IoPPN.

You can find a list of his publications and research here https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/timothy-nicholson(e4a54be3-1be5-471c-8761-568fd2c208d6)/publications.html