Professor Sir Michael Rutter is retiring from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s and receiving an Emeritus Professor title after working at the Institute for 55 years.
Professor Sir Michael Rutter’s extraordinary career is an inspiration to many, laying the foundations of Child Psychiatry and Developmental Psychopathology. Throughout his career he has published upwards of 400 empirical articles and 40 books, many of which have had a lasting impact on our understanding of child development. He is now regarded as the ‘father of Child Psychiatry’, paving the way for developmental psychologists and psychiatrists.
“Research is addictive – addictive because you find out what you didn’t know and what you may never even have imagined” Professor Sir Michael Rutter
To celebrate this extraordinary career, some of Sir Michael’s colleagues, collaborators, and friends have shared their experiences of working with Sir Michael in a short video produced by King’s College London IOPPN, which forms part of this wider blog.
This article is reproduced with the permission of King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) 12 July 2021.
Relevant internal links
‘The Rutter Effect’ – a celebration of Professor Sir Michael Rutter’s contributions to child psychology and psychiatry – Professor Edmund Sonuga-Barke June 2019
A digest of the published work of Michael Rutter 1958-2020 – by Emeritus ProfessorJim Stevenson, September 2020
Discussion
During my MSc Child Adolescent and Family Mental Health, Professor Sir Michael Rutter’s work was the most recommended. If you didn’t read any of the work, it was like you really missed out. This has formed both my knowledge and practice. I still cite some of the work on refugee children todate. I wish Professor Sir Rutter a Happy Retirement.
When I was a Core Trainee in Psychiatry (still an SHO since this was around 20 years ago) and when the MRCPsych exam was only two parts, Part 2 included an essay. The advice from trainers was that the examiners would be quite impressed if we could also include any references to back up our statements in the essay. Amongst the trainees the general rule of thumb was that if the essay topic related to Child Psychiatry or Developmental Psychopathology, one could get away with a Rutter et al reference since given his prolific output it was more like than not that Prof Sir Rutter had published a number of articles on that particular subject!