Professor Gerry Randell, Emeritus Professor of the University of Bradford, has taken the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in this year’s Division of Occupational Psychology Annual Awards scheme. And Dr Kamal Birdi, Senior Lecturer in Occupational Psychology and Director of the MSc in Occupational Psychology at the Institute of Work Psychology, University of Sheffield, has won the 2010 Academic Contribution to Practice Award, being given this year for the first time.

The announcements come as part of the build-up to the annual Practitioner of the Year Awards event, to be held this year in London at the British Medical Association (BMA) on 28^th October. Professor Randell and Dr Birdi will be presented with their awards at the event, which will also showcase the winner of the Practitioner of the Year award itself, together with other selected nominees.

Professor Randell has been Emeritus professor of the University of Bradford since retiring from the Chair of Organisational Behaviour at the Bradford Management Centre in 1997. His long and successful career has many highlights, among them editorship of the International Review of Applied Psychology, President of the 20^th International Congress of Applied Psychology in Edinburgh in 1982, and adviser to the governments of Algeria and Singapore on the teaching and application of psychology within their universities. In addition, his book ‘Staff Appraisal: A first Step To Effective Leadership’ has been through four editions and translated into Spanish.

Dr Kamal Birdi has been based at the Institute of Work Psychology in Sheffield since 1991 and registered as a chartered occupational psychologist since 1999. Over the last 19 years he has focused on conducting in-depth research in two key areas, workplace learning and creativity/innovation, and has striven to translate research findings into better practice for organisations, policy makers and the public.

During work on his PhD, focused on assessing and identifying the factors influencing training and development effectiveness, Dr Birdi developed a new training evaluation framework called the Taxonomy of Training and Development Outcomes (TOTADO), aimed at improving evaluation practice. Since 2000, Kamal has been using TOTADO as a means of helping practitioners develop their evaluation strategies.

The new Academic Contribution to Practice Award has been established to recognise and reward what DOP regards as ‘significant influence by an academic researcher to applied practice’.

Demand is growing for tickets to the Practitioner of the Year Awards event at the BMA on the evening of 28^th October, which promises to be one of the year’s major networking opportunities and a showcase for the profession.

Those interested in getting tickets for the awards event should contact Helen Barnett (helen.barnett@bps.org.uk).