Professor Marcantonio Spada

Marcantonio Spada is Emeritus Professor of Addictive Behaviours and Mental Health. He joined LSBU in August 2009 as Professor of Psychological Therapies tasked with setting up training in CBT and working as a consultant for North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT). He then progressed to becoming Professor of Psychology in 2013 and led the Division of Psychology between 2015 and 2020. In 2018 he was appointed Professor of Addictive Behaviours and Mental Health and was Dean of the School of Applied Sciences between December 2021 and July 2024. Before joining LSBU he held Principal Lectureships at the University of Roehampton and at London Metropolitan University.

Professor Spada has an international standing as a researcher in the broad area of addictive behaviours (with over 200 articles published in international peer reviewed journals and circa two thirds of all outputs in Scimago Q1 journals). His main research focus is on identifying metacognitive factors involved in the development and maintenance of addictive behaviours with the central aim of developing and evaluating new psychological treatments which target metacognitive change.

In 2024 Stanford University, in collaboration with Elsevier, ranked Professor Spada in the top 1% of all scientists (globally) based on standardized citation indicators for both career-long and single recent year categories. His contributions to the field of addictive behaviours have been recognised with fellowships from both the British Psychological Society and the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies. In 2014 Professor Spada established the international peer reviewed journal, Addictive Behaviors Reports, and was its Editor-in-Chief until 2023. In 2018 he was appointed to the role of Editor-in-Chief of Addictive Behaviors (which he still holds), one of the most prestigious international journals in addiction psychiatry and psychology.