Members of the EpiCentre group are listed below. You can click on the link provided to take you to their professional page. After the group leader, people are listed alphabetically. You can also browse our entire department staff and student list A-Z for other members of the Department.

Professor Peter Jones, Head of Department.

Peter is Professor of Psychiatry and Head of the Department of Psychiatry. He trained in medicine at KCL, where he read for a degree in developmental neurobiology, and Westminster Medical School. He took the epidemiology MSc at LSHTM on a MRC training fellowship and returned to the Institute of Psychiatry for his PhD in developmental antecedents of schizophrenia before being appointed as senior lecturer there. He worked in Nottingham for five years before moving to Cambridge in 2000. He has broad interests in population-based approaches to understanding the causes and best treatments for mental health disorders, particularly the psychoses. With colleagues he helped found the award-winning early intervention service for Cambridgeshire, www.cameo.nhs.uk, that hosts a wide range of research; he is currently director of the NIHR CLAHRC focusing on translation of research findings into clinical practice. He was awarded an honorary MD from the University in Oulu in 2006 recognising more than a decade of collaboration in the field of developmental epidemiology and the interface with neuroscience.

Dr Julia Deakin, Clinical Lecturer

Antonia Errazuriz, Ph.D. Candidate

I’m a psychologist interested in the aetiology of common mental disorders and particular in psychosocial factors associated with anxiety and depression in Low and Middle Income Countries. I am currently conducting research on the mental health outcome of economic immigrants to Chile in the Inner Santiago Health Study (www.ishstudy.org).

Dr Emilio Fernandez, Visiting Honorary Research Fellow

I’m a consultant psychiatrist who is interested on understanding the links (if any) between schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders with the ageing process and the diagnosis and treatment of age-related comorbilities in schizophrenia. In this sense, my research focusses on early phases of psychosis (in order to avoid confounder factors such as medication or social deprivation after psychosis onset) and molecular mechanisms linked to the ageing process (telomere length, DNA damage markers) and schizophrenia (GSK3B, AKT1/2).

Dr Golam Khandaker, Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training Fellow

Golam is a Clinical Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, currently reading for a PhD. After finishing his medical degree (MBBS), in 2005 he completed his MPhil in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge, studying premorbid cognitive function in schizophrenia. Subsequently, he trained in clinical psychiatry in Cambridge and Bristol leading to the membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 2009. The same year he was a finalist for the Royal College of Psychiatrists core trainee of the year award. Golam started his PhD in 2010 after securing a place in the highly competitive Wellcome Trust PhD Programme for Clinicians in Cambridge. He is interested in possible links between early life risk factors, neurodevelopment and adult schizophrenia, with a particular focus on the neuroimmunological aspects of the disorder. Currently, he is examining some of these issues in the ALSPAC birth cohort.

Dr James Kirkbride, Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellow

I am a psychiatric epidemiologist interested in the causes of schizophrenia and other major psychotic disorders from an environmental perspective. I am particularly interested in the interplay between genes and environment to lead to the onset of psychosis via disruption of neurobiological pathways. My current research involves investigating the incidence of psychotic disorders in East Anglia through incidence (www.sepea.org) and gene-environment interaction-based case-control studies (www.eu-gei.eu).

Dr Jan Stochl, Research Associate

I am statistician and psychometrician with interest in latent variable modelling. My aim is to contribute to the improvement of scales and other measurement tools used in psychiatry. My background is in math, human movement science and neurological diseases such as Parkinson´s and Huntington´s disease. I am currently involved in psychometric analysis of scales such as PANSS, Calgary Depression scale, or EQ-5D. I also serve as statistician in CAMEO projects LEGS and PAATH.

Dr Kate Xu, Research Associate

I am a Research Associate at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. I’m currently involved in a gene environment project based on the longitudinal study the National Survey of Health and Development (the 1946 British Birth Cohort). Specifically, I develop psychometrically longitudinal phenotypes of cognition and common mental disorder (e.g. depression, anxiety), and investigate how these phenotypes are predicted by early environment and candidate genes (e.g. COMT, MAOA).

Honorary EpiCentre members

Dr Jennifer Barnett, Visiting Honorary Research FellowI’m a psychologist with some training in epidemiology and genetics. I’m interested in how genetic and environmental factors affect cognitive functions and mental health throughout life. This includes the development of relatively rare disorders such as schizophrenia as well as common ones such as anxiety, depression, and dementia. I’m involved in several longitudinal studies including the Northern Finland Birth Cohorts and the National Survey of Health and Development (the 1946 British Birth Cohort)..

Prof Tim Croudace, University of York Tim Croudace is a Senior Lecturer in Psychometric Epidemiology. Tim trained as both an experimental and applied psychologist and in Health Services Research / Health Technology Assessment. He is involved in the design and analysis of epidemiological cohort studies, evaluations of mental health care – including trials of health care interventions – and psychometric analysis of measures used in psychiatric studies. Tim collaborates with international birth cohort studies, the MRC Biostatistics Unit and behavioural scientists in Cambridge, Bristol and Nottingham. Tim characterises his work as the discipline of Psychometric Epidemiology. It involves use of latent variables and item response theory methods for measurement modelling, and structural regression modelling frameworks. He also works with multilevel and longitudinal data using random effects and latent class models. Tim’s collaborative work is funded by the MRC, the Department of Health, the NIHR, the Wellcome Trust and The Newton Trust. He also contributes to and provides training in psychometric methodology to local and national audiences with grant support from the ESRC RDI programme.

Dr Linda Scoriels, Research AssociateI am a cognitive and behavioural neuroscientist and geneticist by background and have been working with patients with first episode psychosis, trying to understand their cognitive and emotional deficits, the neuromechanisms underlying these deficits and finding potential treatments for them. My research focuses particularly on genes involved in cognition and emotion and a wide range of endophenotypes, from metabolites to positive or negative symptoms of psychosis, including immunological and aging markers.

Dr Uli Reininghaus, Institute of Psychiatry, KCLI am a psychologist with a strong interest in social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, focusing on the onset, course, and outcome of psychosis. In my position as Research Associate at Cambridge, I work on the 10-year MRC funded follow-up of the Aetiology and Ethnicity in Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses (ÆSOP) study. This study aims to investigate ethnic differences in the long-term course and outcome of psychosis. The research I conduct as part of my NIHR Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, uses the Experience Sampling Method to investigate stress sensitivity as a mechanism through which exposure to social adversity, particularly in childhood, may increase risk for psychosis.