I am a PhD student undertaking neuroscience research in the field of dementia. Specifically, my research focuses on how the health of small vessels in the brain relate to other brain changes commonly seen in dementia, as a way of understanding the contribution of vessel-related changes in cognitive impairment. As part of this project, I am also looking at the heart-brain connection, by studying the interactions between heart health and risk factors of cerebral small vessel disease, e.g., sex, high blood pressure, exercise, diabetes, etc.

I am a first-gen academic and the first person in my family with an undergrad degree. I studied at Royal Holloway, UCL and worked at the University of Oxford before coming to Cambridge to work with Prof. Rebecca Lawson on the computational psychiatry of anxiety and depression symptoms and their implementation in the brain. I am generally interested in using computational models and neuroimaging to improve our understanding of mental health in a way that is clinically relevant.

I am a final year PhD student in psychiatry and a first-generation university student. I dropped out of high school at the age of 15 due to a specific learning disability (ADHD) and only returned after my own daughter graduated. I’ve completed an AS at City College of San Francisco in Environmental Science and Studies, my BS at UC Berkeley in Molecular Environmental Biology, and my MPhil in Medicine at Cambridge. My current research is aimed at expanding the evidence and understanding of the relationship between sleep and social recovery in psychosis. With a secondary aim of examining the mediating effects of changes in cognition as part of the causal pathway. My research is motivated by input from people with lived experience with psychosis and based on what they have reported as an issue when becoming unwell and the most important components of their recovery.

Hi, I’m Caoimhe, a second year Psychology PhD student from Ireland. I’m part of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research. My PhD looks at families during the transition to primary school. I examine the experiences and processes that face not only children, but the whole family, and how we can use this knowledge to better support families during the start to school.

Hello, my name is Dianna and I am a third-year PhD student whose research investigates how social experiences following birth relate to infants’ development of brain mechanisms involved in the processing of social information. Typically I work with babies from birth up to their first year of life, and use a variety of methods ranging from infant-friendly neuroimaging approaches such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to recordings of parent-infant social interactions. Understanding how environment shapes the developing brain is crucial to informing us about the ideal conditions for babies’ growth and developing interventions for those at high risk for developmental disorders.

I’m Elena, currently a 1st year PhD student at the MRC CBU. My research focuses on post-stroke aphasia, which affects approximately one-third of stroke survivors and leads to language deficits; I will be using an app to deliver a novel therapy that targets its most pervasive symptom: word-retrieval difficulties. At the same time, I will be using neuroimaging (fMRI) to explore the neural mechanisms that underlie recovery.

I am an Alzheimer’s Society Clinical Research Fellow researching dementias in the Old Age Psychiatry group under Professor John O’Brien. I use ultra-high resolution MRI scans to investigate Dementia with Lewy bodies and Alzheimer’s disease. I work and study part-time as I have two small children. I am the first in my family to undertake a PhD and I am interested in helping to widen participation in academia.

I am very curious understanding what makes organisms behave and how behaviour depends on its environment. I am researching how a group of molecules, called ion channels, influence behaviour. Ion channels are on the outside of every cell and they are responsible for communicating to the outside world and other cells. What I love about science is that it never gets boring, you can think about problems from so many angles and you need to come up with creative experiments. Outside the lab, I enjoy doing Parkour, traversing obstacles in an urban environment; as you can imagine there is also a lot of creativity involved in that.

I am a second-year PhD student in Fletcher lab, Department of Psychiatry. My research focuses on understanding the experience of self and interoception in schizotypy and psychosis.  To understand these mechanisms, I intend to use state of the art measures of interoceptive processing and examine the integration of interoceptive and exteroceptive signals in shaping the experience of the self. I also work in NHS (NHFT) where I am currently working on a number of projects investigating how can we improve mental and physical health using wearable technologies. 

Hello, my name is Grace and I’m from Hong Kong. My research focuses on biofeedback in virtual reality (VR), which is a promising way for individuals to learn the ability to control their own physiological responses. In particular, I aim to understand how individual differences may affect the efficacy and therapeutic outcomes of VR biofeedback in stress management and anxiety regulation. With a strong interest in digital mental health, I’m curious in knowing how we can utilise technology and game design to improve people’s psychological wellbeing. 

I’m a first-year PhD student interested in developing new computational methods that leverage biological knowledge to address open questions related to mental health and psychiatric disorders. In particular, my work seeks to characterize and predict the spectrum of psychotic disorders by using machine learning to combine multiple types of neuroimaging-derived brain connectivity as well as genetic and other biological data.

After my psychology undergraduate degree, I worked in mental health and social care before doing a Masters in Mental Health Ethics and Law. I have continued to pursue my interest in the intersections between mental health, ethics, and human rights through my PhD research. I am using a socio-legal approach to examine how adults with intellectual disabilities are supported to make decisions about contraception. My PhD has two parts: 1. Interviewing people with intellectual disabilities and surveying their supporters to find out about their experiences of contraceptive decision-making. 2. Analysing how their experiences compare to what two legal frameworks say about people making their own decisions in life.

Hi, my name is Keith (he/him) and I am from Taiwan. My doctoral research aims to understand how immigrant/refugee children struggle to learn to read in an East Asian context. To this aim, I am currently doing neuroacoustic research on the rhythm of the poetry that we learn to read in Taiwanese, Vietnamese, and Hongkongers’ adolescence. We hope that this doctoral research will serve as a touchtone to further psycholinguistic research on reading and learning difficulties in an East Asian context.

My research aims to understand the impact of cannabis on reward cognition, including apathy and anhedonia, and reward processing in the brain. I am especially interested in the impact on adolescent cannabis users. I am also interested in the effects of other psychoactive substances on brain and cognition, use of psychedelics and other substances to treat mental health conditions, and drug policy reform. I am funded by the Aker Foundation. 

I’m a Gates Cambridge Scholar and for my PhD, I am examining the link between parent-child conversations and children’s executive functions. I administer cognitive assessments to 4- to 6-year-old children and obtain recordings of family talk unobtrusively in the family’s natural environment via wearable audio processing devices. I’m particularly interested in conversations that occur at mealtimes and finding ways in which parental talk can promote children’s cognitive development.

I’m a PhD student studying the relationship between memories and our emotional well-being. I’m interested in understanding how we might control and prevent the recall of unwanted memories, and how this control might positively impact adaptive behaviours and psychological health. To this end, I analyse neuroimaging (fMRI) data and behavioural experiments to better understand these processes.

My PhD uses quantitative statistical methods to address gender-based stereotypes about self-harm. This work is contextualised within the history of academic literature on self-harm (1960s-present), which has perpetuated the idea that self-harm is “something girls do” because women lack self-control and are more emotional than men. I also supervise student dissertations which consider the societal contexts which place some groups of people at higher risk of self-harm, namely LGBTQ+ identity/discrimination and intersections of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and childhood trauma.

My name’s Rebecca and I’m a first year PhD student specialising in dementia research. I use behavioural tests, neuroimaging and computational modelling to explore how the brain works and what might go wrong to cause dementia symptoms such as apathy. I’m originally from the North of England so love a good brew while I work. I also enjoy baking (a hobby you can eat = win-win) and taking part in theatre around Cambridge.

I am a second year PhD student at the Autism Research Centre, studying brain development in autism and other neurodevelopmental conditions using structural MRI. I am particularly interested in how brain development in those with neurodevelopmental conditions deviates from typical brain development, and what factors contribute to the huge variability that we see in these conditions and the association neuroanatomical alterations and trajectories. For example, my research looks at the impact of sex differences, differences across age, symptom profiles, and scan quality.

I grew up in Germany and moved to England for university where I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford in 2019. Throughout my undergraduate degree, I undertook several research internships relating to topics ranging from learning theory to cellular mechanisms in neurodegeneration in the UK and the US. In 2020, I completed my MPhil in Basic and Translational Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge where I am currently a PhD student in Professor David Belin’s lab. My work mainly focuses on the plasticity of amygdala neurons in substance use disorders, which I investigate using behavioural rat models of cocaine addiction. I use whole-cell patch clamp electrophysiology and molecular biology methods to elucidate these mechanisms.

My research aims to elucidate the ways in which early life adversity, genetic propensity, and neural connectivity interact to shape one another and thereby influence early childhood development. In doing so, I utilise methods such as polygenic risk score analysis, partial least squares regression, and structural equation modelling.

I am a second-year PhD student at the Department of Psychiatry. I am interested in understanding the emotional symptoms and specific behavioural symptoms in children with ADHD and comparing them with children without an ADHD diagnosis but with similar behavioural symptoms, children with multiple diagnoses, and typically developing children using a transdiagnostic approach. I am also interested in understanding whether the relationship between behaviour, cognition, and mental health in children with ADHD change across the childhood years.