At the Developmental Affective Science Lab we study the role of cognitive, social and affective processes in the development and maintenance of common mental health problems across the lifespan, with a particular focus on adolescence. We are interested in finding out how these processes all work together. For example, does cognitive capacity influence other processes such as emotion regulation? And how? What does this look like in the brain and how does it change as we get older? We also know that peers and social information, such as who likes us and who doesn't, becomes very important during adolescence. More important in fact than at any other time in our lives. In our lab we are exploring how individual differences in the sensitivity to this social information is related to young people's mental well-being and their cognition – even their ability to learn new things. Adopting a translational perspective, I apply insights from this work in basic developmental cognitive neuroscience to design novel interventions for mental health problems including depression and posttraumatic stress disorder. Before establishing the Developmental Affective Science Lab, I worked at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and completed my PhD as a Gates Scholar and later postdoc at the University of Cambridge's MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.