I am a Scientia Associate Professor and Australian Research Council DECRA fellow at the UNSW School of Psychology. My lab studies 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 and the perinatal period.  

We are interested in finding out how these processes all work together. 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 or during certain reproductive periods?  

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, anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder. Before establishing the Developmental Affective Science Lab, I was a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the University of Cambridge and the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and I worked as research fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. I completed my PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience as Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.