Our Team
Prof Sarah Garfinkel
Principal Investigator
Prof Sarah Garfinkel leads the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience group at UCL. Sarah investigates the way emotion processing is altered in clinical and neurodevelopmental conditions including anxiety, autism, PTSD and psychosis, and is interested in how aberrant emotional processing can shape cognition to augment fear memory and alter attention. The brain and the body are intrinsically and dynamically coupled - Sarah's work investigates how signals from the body can interact with the brain to guide how we think and feel. Sarah investigates emotion-cognition interactions peripherally (using psychophysiology, e.g. ECG) and centrally (e.g. fMRI), and collaborates with psychiatrists and neurologists to understand interoceptive mechanisms underlying altered emotion processing in clinical and neurological conditions. Sarah’s research is fully translational, mapping out basic mechanisms with a view to informing evidence based novel treatments.
Dr Camilla Nord
Principal Investigator
Dr Camilla Nord leads the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, where she is an MRC Programme Leader, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, and a Wellcome Career Development Award fellow. Her lab investigates brain-body interactions in neuropsychiatric disorders using methods from cognitive and computational neuroscience. Their work spans from basic discovery neuroscience -- including identifying brain, immune, or metabolic mechanisms of mental health disorders -- to applied translational science, including experimental medicine studies of novel treatments. Camilla is also known for her public communication of science, including her recent book The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health, a Sunday Times and Financial Times Book of the Year.
Prof Hugo Critchley
Co-Investigator
Prof Hugo Critchley trained in physiology and medicine at the University of Liverpool and gained his DPhil in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford. He then embarked on his psychiatry training, and has pursued his interest in brain imaging studies for the last 20 years. He was based at the KCL Institute of Psychiatry in London, before moving to the UCL Institute of Neurology. In 2006 Prof Critchley left his position as Principal Research Fellow / Senior Clinical Fellow at the Wellcome Department of imaging neuroscience, to join Brighton and Sussex Medical School as the Foundation Chair in Psychiatry.
Prof Tim Dalgleish
Co-Investigator
Prof Tim Dalgleish is a clinical psychologist and Programme Lead for the Cognition, Emotion and Mental Health Programme. Tim is also director of the Cambridge Centre for Affective Disorders (C2:AD). In brief, his research interests include: a transdiagnostic approach to understanding and ameliorating mood, anxiety and stress-related disorders across the lifespan; translating findings from basic behavioural science and neuroscience research into the development of novel clinical and educational interventions and assessments; evaluation and refinement of existing evidence-based psychological interventions and preventions for mental health problems.
Dr Edwin Dalmaijer
Co-Investigator
Dr Edwin Dalmaijer’s research interests are best summarised as the quantitative exploration of development, both within individuals and in populations. Broadly, he investigates how affective and cognitive faculties impact each other, and how they are affected by the environment. Edwin triangulates problems with narrowly focussed experiments aided by computational models of behaviour, with machine learning to find complex patterns in large secondary datasets, and with agent-based population simulations.
Dr Jessica Eccles
Co-Investigator
Dr Jessica Eccles is a Consultant Psychiatrist in the Neurodevelopmental Service at Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, where she and colleagues have set up the world’s first Neurodivergent Brain Body Clinic. Having trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and Oxford, she completed integrated academic training in Psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS), where she undertook an MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship. She is now a Reader in Brain-Body Medicine at the BSMS Department of Clinical Neuroscience where she leads prize winning research on a broad range of projects that link differences in the body to a variety of physical and mental health conditions. She has extensive experience conducting research alongside clinical populations. Dr Eccles believes that the false dichotomy between body and brain hinders our holistic understanding of human experience, holds back clinical practice and research and further perpetuates stigma. She hopes her lab’s work encourages curiosity and challenges stereotypes. She is a passionate educator and committed to public engagement.
Dr Lucy Foulkes
Co-Investigator
Dr Lucy Foulkes is an academic psychologist conducting research into mental health and social development in adolescence, focusing on the negative consequences of increased mental health awareness in schools and society more broadly. She is currently a Prudence Trust Research Fellow and an NIHR Senior Research Fellow in the Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford. Her group's work has recently been discussed on BBC2’s Newsnight and BBC Radio 4’s Analysis, and in The Economist, The Times, New Scientist, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Her first book, What Mental Illness Really Is (…and what it isn’t), is out now in paperback. Her second book, Coming Of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us, is out on 4 July 2024.
Dr Lydia Hickman
Post Doctoral Research Associate
Dr Lydia Hickman is a Research Associate at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge. Her work aims to uncover how the perception of bodily signals (interoception) differs in mental health conditions, with a view to developing a range of interoception-based interventions. On the EM-Body project, Lydia will be creating novel interoception measures, informed by the lived experience of individuals with mental health conditions. Prior to this, she completed a BA in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and an MSc and PhD in Psychology at the University of Birmingham (PI: Prof Jennifer Cook). Her PhD work assessed movement, social cognition and interoception in clinical conditions (e.g., Parkinson’s Disease, Autism) and following pharmacological interventions.
Beth Longley
Research Assistant
Beth Longley is a Research Assistant in the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience group at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Beth now works on the Em-Body Study alongside Dr Hannah Savage and Prof Sarah Garfinkel. Beth previously completed the MRes Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL where she investigated how types of sensory processing, such as interoception or olfaction, relate to transdiagnostic mental health symptoms.
Dr Hannah Savage
Post Doctoral Research Associate
Dr Hannah Savage is a Research Fellow in the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Group (PI Garfinkel) at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, currently working on the Em-Body Study. Prior to this, she completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne where she investigated how the brain processes changing threat and safety information using functional neuroimaging, psychophysiological recordings and subjective reports, in patients with social anxiety disorder and unaffected controls. She then moved to the Predictive Clinical Neuroscience Lab (PI Marquand), at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour for a postdoc where she applied the normative modelling framework, and other machine learning/statistics approaches to functional MRI data to better understand how brain activation varies in across the population and in relation to mental health. Hannah now works on the Em-Body Study, and in the future aims to combine neuroimaging, psychophysiology, interoception assessments and subjective reports to better understand the cause and maintenance of social anxiety disorder.
Dr Adrian Yoris
Co-Investigator
Dr Adrian Yoris studied psychology and graduated in 2009. Subsequently, Adrian trained as a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety and depression disorders. Between 2014 and 2018, Adrian pursued his PhD in psychology (neurosciences) at UCA with his workplace being the INCYT. Adrian's doctoral thesis focused on the multidimensional characteristics of interoceptive distortions in panic, generalized anxiety, and OCD, as well as metabolic disorders such as hypertension. Since 2019, Adrian has held postdoctoral positions at INCYT, along with a postdoctoral stay at USJ in Beirut, Lebanon, and the University of Granada, Spain. Currently, he is a researcher at CONICET in the assistant category, and his interest lies in studying transdiagnostic mechanisms in mental health, with a focus on cardiac interoception. His obsession in this field is to characterize and validate the study of HEP as an electrophysiological measure of interoception. Additionally, in 2025, Adrian will join UCL as part of this collaborative team. As an enthusiastic member of the EM-BODY research team, he brings a Latino-like blend of passion, curiosity, and dedication to every project he undertakes.
Prof Lisa Feldman Barrett
Scientific Advisory Board Chair
Prof Lisa Feldman Barrett is a university distinguished professor at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Her lab is developing a systems-level model of brain and body mechanisms to unify human affect, emotion, motivation, cognition and action. She takes a multidisciplinary approach, incorporating methods and concepts from a range of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, physiology, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, evolutionary and developmental biology, computer science, engineering and the history of science. She is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for transformative research, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (APA). She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and a number of other honorific societies. She is also a former president of the APS. She has testified before the US Congress, is the Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at MGH, and actively engages in informal science education for the public via popular books, articles and public lectures.
