Professor Dasha Nicholls leads the Child and Adolescent Mental Health research team in the Division of Psychiatry at Imperial College London, of which she serves as Deputy Head. She is a practising Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in CNWL Children and Young People’s Eating Disorders Service, leading the training academy for CNWL CAMHS and Eating Disorders Services (EDS).
She is the lead for Multimorbidity and Mental Health for the North West London Applied Research Collaboration (ARC). Her group’s research aims to improve understanding and interventions for children and young people with feeding and eating disorders and those living at higher weight, as well as a broader focus on young people’s mental health through population health research, of which she is the National Speciality Advisor on Eating Disorders to NHS England. In particular, it focusses on risk factors and early intervention, and seeks practical and scale-able solutions, from parent training to policy change, that directly influence outcomes. In the ARC, the applied health and care research responds to, and meets, the needs of local populations and local health and care systems for the care of people with multimorbidity and frailty, including where mental illness is a comorbidity.
She served on the NICE guideline committee for eating disorders, the NICE quality standards committee, the NHS England Expert Reference Group developing the commissioning guidance for children and young people’s eating disorders services (CYP EDS), and helped develop quality standards for CYP EDS. She leads the National Whole Team training for CYP EDS.
She is a Clinical and Strategic Director for National Audits and Research in the College Centre for Quality Improvement at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, with current responsibility for delivery on the National Audits of Psychosis and Dementia. She co-founded the Child and Adolescents Psychiatric Surveillance System (CAPSS) for research into rare disorders and events in child mental health, hosted in CCQI. She served as a chair of the Eating Disorder Faculty of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych) and was a member of the RCPsych Board of Trustees and the International Advisory Committee, leading the development and revision of the guidelines on the management of medical emergencies in eating disorders. She is also a Past President of the Academy of Eating Disorders, the largest international eating disorders professional association, and instigated development of the British Eating Disorders Society.