My research aims to understand the role of early environmental risks (such as child trauma) in mental health. As part of my Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship, I am investigating the extent to which adverse childhood experience cause mental health problems. This involves using causal inference methods to disentangle the effects of adversities from other genetic and environmental risk factors. I have experience in family designs (e.g., twin-based methods), polygenic scoring, and statistical approaches (e.g., propensity score matching). 

I am also interested in how the measurement of childhood adversity is related to mental health problems. This interest builds on earlier meta-analytic work that I led which found that prospective and retrospective measures of childhood adversity identify largely different groups of individuals, and therefore may differentially predict health outcomes. 

I am passionate about open science and seek to apply these methods wherever possible in my work (e.g., through Registered Reports, pre-registration, and sharing data and code). I have also contributed guidance on the use of pre-registration in secondary data analysis. Outside of my own research, I aim to promote open research practices more widely at UCL through my role as Local Network Lead for the UK Reproducibility Network, and co-lead of the UCL ReproducibiliTea Journal Club.