I am based at the Centre for Psychiatry, Brain Sciences Division at Imperial College London and I also work as a Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in the West London Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.



RESEARCH

My research takes an experimental medicine and cognitive phenotyping approach to investigate the cognitive processes underlying emotional dysregulation and mood instability across mental disorders. I focus on young people and vulnerability to mood instability, with the aim of developing innovative early interventions.

A special interest of my work is how mental imagery-based cognition, such as episodic future simulation, may contribute to mood instability and self-harm behaviour in young people.

Integrating psychiatry, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, I use a variety of approaches, from behavioural experiments, to psychophysiology, and neuroimaging to investigate research areas.

A key part of my work is to evaluate and translate experimental findings into early stage clinical treatment studies, in particular developing brief and customisable interventions enabled by digital tools. One recent development is the IMAGINATOR App for episodic simulation-based self-harm reduction, which was built together with an advisory group of young people with lived experience of self-harm. You can hear more about the development of IMAGINATOR here, presented at the MindTech 2017 Symposium.