My academic career started at the University of Bristol with a degree in Physiology. I then went on to study for a Master’s in Neuroimaging at King’s College London where I became interested in mental health and learnt skills in fMRI data collection and analysis. This provided the basis for my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience with Dr Ray Norbury and Dr Leigh Gibson at the University of Roehampton where I studied the behavioural and neural mechanisms underlying the relationship between late chronotype and major depression. This sparked my interest in sleep and circadian rhythms and is a topic I am still pursuing. After my PhD, I went back to KCL to complete a post-doc with Professor Sukhi Shergill looking at the mechanisms underling treatment resistance in psychosis. Here I spent three years analysing MRI data to understand why approximately one-third of patients do not respond to antipsychotic medication.
 
I now work as a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol (where I started!). Here I work with Professor Ian Penton-Voak and Dr Helen Bould on 1) identifying neural markers of an adjunct therapy (Cognitive Bias Modification) for people with depression using fMRI, 2) investigating the relationship between attention towards lower-weight bodies and body dissatisfaction using eye-tracking, and 3) understanding whether psychological therapies for mental health could be improved if delivery timing was synchronised to individual chronotype. I am funded by the Bristol Biomedical Research Council (BRC) and am part of the TARG research group (in School of Psychological Science).