POWIC is a group of researchers, headed by the eminent psychiatrist and researcher Professor Tim Crow, whose aims are to elucidate the nature and causes of major psychotic illness (including schizophrenic and affective psychoses) with a view to improving their treatment, and to act as a fulcrum for discussion of the progress of research in this field and for the dissemination of information.

Three symbiotic research directions constituting three levels of explanation are pursued in the quest for an organic basis for mental illness at POWIC: genetics, neuropathology, and neuroimaging / psychology. (Click here for a description of POWIC's working hypothesis.)

POWIC is currently housed in the new Prince of Wales International Centre for SANE Research within the University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry at the Warneford Hospital, that comprises laboratories for gene expression, cell culture and histopathology, and image analysis, and in the Department of Neuropathology in the Radcliffe Infirmary.