Awards

ESSPD Excellence Award

The ESSPD aims to recognize research that clearly pushes forward the field of personality disorders worldwide and makes an outstanding contribution to the understanding and treatment of individuals with personality disorders.

Selection criteria

Selection was based on originality, the impact on the field, the quality of the methods, the involvement of persons with lived experience (if applicable) and the potential for stimulating new research perspectives.

2026

No ESSPD Excellence Award was awarded in 2026

ESSPD Early Career Researcher Award 2026

The European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD) established the Early Career Researchers Award in order to stimulate early career researchers to perform innovative research in the broad field of personality disorders. The selection criteria for the award jury will be:

  • The research idea has to be original, innovative and methodologically sound
  • It has to connect different domains of research, resulting in a new perspective
  • The research has to be the applicant’s own project, is not part of a larger institutional project and has to be adequately presented and discussed.
  • The applicant has not finished his/her/their post academic traineeship or residencies longer than 10 years before March 31st, 2026

The ESSPD warmly congratulates the recipients of the 2026 awards for their outstanding contributions to personality disorder research, presented at the 8th International Congress on Borderline Personality Disorder and Allied Disorders in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Majse Lind, PhD
ESSPD Early Career Researchers Award 2026
Narrative Identity and Personality Pathology

Mariana Mendoza Alvarez
ESSPD Early Career Researchers Award 2026
REM Sleep and Overnight Emotional Recalibration of Distress in Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder

Poster awards 2026

The ESSPD awarded three Scientific Committee poster awards and one Audience poster award to outstanding posters presented at the 8th International Congress on Borderline Personality Disorder and Allied Disorders in Lausanne, Switzerland

Lynn Courey
Scientific Committee Poster Award 2026
Scaling Hope: A Peer-Delivered, Evidence-Informed Framework for Transforming Family Support in Personality Disorder Care

Sophie Lucas
Scientific Committee Poster Award 2026
A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Recovery-Oriented Peer and Clinician Co-Facilitated Group for Borderline Personality Disorder

Aleksandra Pilarska
Scientific Committee Poster Award 2026
Beyond Trait Severity: Functional Appraisals, Desired Levels, and Self–Meta Discrepancies in Pathological Traits

Christina Thylander
Audience Poster Award 2026
Elevated Negative Affectivity and Psychoticism in Individuals with Active Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (NSSI): A Comparison of Individuals with Current, Previous, or No NSSI