Dr Emma Jayne Kilford carried out her PhD research at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience under the supervision of Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Dr Vaughan Bell. Her PhD research examined the development of cognitive control and its integration with social cognitive and motivational-affective processing during adolescence, using a combination of genetic, cognitive and computational research techniques.

After completing her PhD, Emma worked as a postdoctoral research associate on the project '”Developing a scalable treatment for depression in rural South Africa', funded by a GCRF Global Impact Acceleration Award. This project formed part of a larger, on-going MRC-funded project titled “Digital delivery of Behavioural Activation to overcome depression and facilitate social and economic transitions of adolescents in LMICs (DoBat)”.

Emma is currently working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCL Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology on a translational research project titled “Treating depression with self-compassion in virtual reality”, funded by a NIHR i4i Mental Health Challenge Award to Professors John King and Chris Brewin. She also remains an active member of the DoBat research team – a multidisciplinary group of psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists and economists from South Africa, Uganda, the UK  (University of Oxford, University of Exeter, Cambridge, UCL and the USA (University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA).