MA MD FRCPsych FMedSci
Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Cambridge
Personal statement:
I am a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist pursuing research into the connections between human development and psychopathology.
I am particularly interested in the relations between genetics, endocrine physiology and emotion processes. How psychoendocrine processes influence the liability and outcome of emotional and behavioural disorders over the first 2 decades of life is the clinical focus of interest.
My studies are centred on children and adolescents in the community as well as current patients and their relatives.
Our designs involve experimental approaches to measuring feelings and thoughts, salivary analyses of circulating hormones, genetic psychophysiological and neuroimaging techniques of brain-behaviour relationships. We use these methods and techniques in longitudinal studies and randomised controlled trials.
We collaborate with a number of other research groups in Cambridge including the MRC Cognitive and brain Sciences Unit, Wolfson Brain Imaging Unit, and the Behavioural and clinical Neurosciences Institute.
We undertake randomised controlled trials in children and adolescents with anxiety, depression and conduct disorder. Currently we have a partnership with University College London within which we run the two largest trials yet conducted in young people. A relapse prevention trial in depressed adolescents (the IMPACT study) and a pragmatic effectiveness trial for children at risk of exclusion from their families because of severe conduct disorder the START trial.