I am a student on the UCL Wellcome 4-year PhD in Mental Health Science. I am most interested in dissecting the heterogeneity of mental health conditions, so as to pave the way towards personalised mental healthcare. Depression, for example, shows a bewildering diversity of clinical presentations, which likely reflect distinct underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Confusing this further, even identical symptom profiles might arise from different mechanisms. Consequently, treatments for mental illness do not work for everyone, and clinicians currently have little to no decision tools to assess which treatment is most likely to work for a specific patient. 

I am most excited by emerging techniques in computational psychiatry - generative modelling and machine learning - that can address these challenges by developing more biologically valid and clinically predictive phenotypes. Sub-typing patient populations and specifying them in terms of neurocognitive mechanisms allows subsequent treatment response studies to identify which treatments work best for whom. During my rotations, I am keen to gain experience in tackling heterogeneity using techniques from different disciplines.

Prior to this PhD programme, I did the BSc in Psychology and Language Sciences at UCL, and the MSc in Psychological Research at the University of Oxford. I became interested in mental health research during my MSc by working on interoception, or how the brain senses and integrates bodily states to provide the building blocks for emotion. Altered interoception is implicated in a wide range of mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, and I am particularly interested in investigating this neurocognitive mechanism from a ‘Bayesian Brain’ perspective.