Thorsten Barnhofer

Thorsten is a research clinical psychologist. He received his PhD from the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität, Münster, Germany, where he also earned his qualification as a cognitive behavioural therapist, the German equivalent to the English Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. His training in mindfulness based interventions has included an internship at the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the UMass Medical School in Worcester, MA, founded by Jon Kabat-Zinn, numerous teaching retreats with leading Western and Eastern practitioners, and has benefited from almost a decade of work in the group of one of the founders of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, Mark Williams.

He has been involved in research on mindfulness based interventions from an early stage of their development. He worked at the University of Oxford from 2003 until 2012 as part of a Wellcome Trust funded team investigating the use of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for highly vulnerable patients, and independently as a Clinical Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, from 2012 until 2013. A prestigious Heisenberg Fellowship from the German Research Foundation allowed him to conduct research into the neural mechanisms of mindfulness training at the Freie Universität Berlin from 2013 until 2015. From 2015 until 2018, he worked as an Associate Professor at the Mood Disorders Centre, University of Exeter, where he led the training programmes in mindfulness based interventions. Since 2018, he has been a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Surrey.

Thorsten works closely with Oxford Mindfulness, providing leadership and expertise across the charity’s research programmes. He also contributes to teacher training and professional development programmes as a guest trainer, bringing his extensive experience in mindfulness research, clinical psychology, and mindfulness based interventions to practitioners and trainees worldwide.