Lab Directors
Professor Rachel Upthegrove
Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health, Consultant Psychiatrist Early Intervention in Psychosis
Professor Upthegrove is Professor of Psychiatry and Youth Mental Health at the University of Birmingham, and Consultant Psychiatrist in the Birmingham Early Intervention Services. Her research Interest is within the field of major mental illness; particularly schizophrenia and co-morbid depression in early phases of illness. Recent projects have developed the investigation of inflammatory models of psychosis and machine learning in prognostic indicators in early phases of developing mental ill health.
School webpage • Email: r.upthegrove@bham.ac.uk • Twitter: @RachelUTG • Telephone: +44 (0)121 414 6241
Dr Jack Rogers
Associate Professor in Psychology and Youth Mental Health
Dr Rogers is Associate Professor in Psychology and Youth Mental Health based within the Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. His work uses multi-disciplinary methods such as clinical assessment, neuropsychological testing and neuroimaging techniques to better understand how brain maturation promotes normal cognitive development, and what causes this development to be derailed in young people at increased risk for psychiatric conditions.
School webpage • Email: j.rogers@bham.ac.uk • Twitter: @jackcrogers • Telephone: +44(0) 121 414896
Principal Investigators
Dr Maria Dauvermann
Assistant Professor in Psychology and Youth Mental Health
Dr Maria Dauvermann is Assistant Professor in Psychology and Youth Mental Health at the Institute for Mental Health, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Her research focusses on the identification of risk and resilience markers in young people who are at high risk of developing psychosis and other mental health conditions. She is also interested in integrating stress and immune response in psychosis. She uses cognitive neuroscientific and interdisciplinary methods to integrate neurobiological, psychological and psychosocial factors to better understand how youth vulnerability can influence and be influenced by psychosis.
School webpage • Email: m.dauvermann@bham.ac.uk • Google Scholar • Telephone: +44 (0)121 4142787
Dr Emma Černis
Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology
Dr Černis is a clinical psychologist with over a decade of experience in translational psychological intervention research. Her expertise includes co-ordinating clinical trials and delivering trial-standard CBT therapy for psychotic symptoms across the lifespan, including working with young people with At Risk Mental State. Her research focuses on the psychological understanding and treatment of dissociation. In a recent Wellcome Trust-funded Clinical Doctoral Fellowship programme of research, Emma delineated a subset of dissociative experiences common in psychosis, and demonstrated links between these experiences and key symptoms of psychosis.
School webpage • Email: e.cernis@bham.ac.uk • Twitter: @ECernis • Link to publications
Research Fellows
Dr Siân Lowri Griffiths
Dr Griffiths is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Professor Rachel Upthegrove on the Psychosis Immune Mechanism Stratified Medicine Study (PIMS) and the NIHR ADePP trial. She has extensive experience of working on clinical trials and observational studies within the area of psychosis and youth mental health. Dr Griffiths is interested in heterogeneity in treatment outcomes and incomplete recovery in first episode psychosis.
Twitter: @lowrigriffiths_ • LinkedIn • Link to publications
Dr Paris Lalousis
Paris is a joint funded Priestley Birmingham-Melbourne PhD fellow at the Institute for Mental Health and the Centre for Human Brain Health of the University of Birmingham. He graduated with a first class honours BSc in Psychology from the University of Wales and a distinction MSc in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Birmingham. After working as an assistant psychologist in the Birmingham early intervention in psychosis team, he embarked on doctoral training in the field of precision medicine in psychiatry. During his doctoral training he has completed projects that use advanced machine learning approaches to disentangle the heterogeneity between and within psychosis and depression. He has fostered collaborations with researchers from Ludwig-Maxmilians University Munich, ORYGEN, University of Melbourne, and University of Sydney among others. His research aims to use data science to develop transdiagnostic tools to facilitate personalized medicine in emerging mental health disorders.
Twitter: @P_Lalousis • LinkedIn • Link to publications
Dr Mrunal Bandawar
Trained as a doctor, following passion in research, Dr Bandawar driven by translational work in neuroscience from bench to bed side. Expansion of the knowledge in basic and clinical sciences, increased the gap between them. I work as a clinician researcher, working to bridge the gap between basic psychological neurocognitive theories and clinical research in addiction medicine. My present work is on development and testing of an in-house built inhibitory control training smart-phone game in alcohol use disorder.
Dr Andrey Barsky
Andrey Barsky is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Computational Biology, Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, with interests in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision. He currently works on multimodal representation learning in medical imaging and clinical datasets.
Dr John Williams
Dr John Williams is a Research Fellow based at the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, and works in behavioural multiomics data integration and analysis. He works to understand the biological basis of complex and diverse behavioural phenotypes by modelling genomic, transcriptomic and clinical data.
Dr David Salam
David Salam is an NIHR academic clinical fellow undergoing academic training integrated with clinical training in psychiatry in Birmingham. He is supervised by Professor Rachel Upthegrove and has research interests in predictive models and biomarkers in psychosis and mood disorders. His BSc dissertation was on the topic of EEG measures as biomarkers in schizophrenia and which led to his interest in the assessment of functional neural activity in mental illness. He is currently engaged in contributing to the PRESCIENT study and is keen to get involved in other projects of interest where possible.
Dr Edward Palmer
Ed is NIHR funded Academic Clinical Fellow and a Wellcome Trust funded Midlands Mental Health and Neuroscience Doctoral Training Program PhD candidate supervised by Professor Rachel Upthegrove and Dr Jack Rogers at the University of Birmingham. His work combines both training and clinical practice in Psychiatry along side academic research. The focus of his PhD research is using neuroimaging to better understand the role of inflammation in early psychosis and development of novel treatments for psychosis. He is currently contributing to a number of clinical trials including the NIHR ADePP trial, the Psychosis Immune Mechanism Stratified Medicine Study (PIMS) and a large trial looking at mental health outcomes post Mild traumatic brain injury. Ed also has research interests in Psychedelic-Psychopharmacology and Bioethics. He sits on the Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Clinical Ethics committee and is a Trustee of Tourettes Action UK where he is passionate about raising awareness about Tourettes, improving access to services and empowering people with Tourettes and other neurodiversities in the work place.
Twitter: @EdPalmer5 • LinkedIn
Associate Research Psychologists
Tyler Weetman
I am a Psychology postgraduate from the University of Birmingham with a particular interest in developmental psychopathology. Currently, I work as an assistant research psychologist responsible for the promotion and recruitment of a clinical trial (ADEPP) under the guidance of Professor Upthegrove. The ADEPP study aims to establish whether we can PREVENT depression and anxiety after psychosis by using a low dose antidepressant medication and whether this can improve patient's functional outcomes and reduce risk of relapse.
Melanie Lafanechere
I completed a BSc in Psychology at Aston University where I did a research placement in Psychopathy and Conduct Disorder at the University of New South Wales and Neuroscience Research Australia, respectively. I subsequently completed an MSc in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Birmingham where I investigated the neural correlates of Conduct Disorder and Callous-Unemotional traits as a part of the FemNAT-CD project. I am now Research Project Officer for Dr. Rachel Upthegrove, working on the international PRESCIENT project, investigating the longitudinal trajectories of Psychosis in clinically high-risk populations and the PIMS Trial, which is double-blind randomised placebo trial that investigates an anti-inflammatory in First Episode Psychosis patients.
Ella Warwick
I am a Research Associate working on the Psychosis Immune Mechanism Stratified Medicine Study (PIMS) under the supervision of Professor Rachel Upthegrove. I graduated with first class honours in BSc Neuroscience at the University of Bristol in 2021, where I developed an interest in the cellular and molecular processes underpinning various mental health conditions and neurological disabilities. Following this, I worked as a carer within a multidisciplinary team at an inpatient brain injury rehabilitation centre. Here I gained invaluable insight into the world of healthcare and became dedicated to supporting individuals through adverse periods of their lives. I am honoured to now be part of the PIMS research group, a team devoted to furthering the field’s understanding of the underlaying mechanisms of schizophrenia, whose work will consequently inform the development of future treatment to support these individuals.
Aanya Malaviya
Aanya is a Research Associate at Birmingham studying childhood adversity, early life experiences and their impact on brain function. Her area of interest is studying the underlying mechanisms of different disorders and providing appropriate support to individuals with such conditions. She did her Masters in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Birmingham. During her Masters, she investigated the role of social defeat in neurological differences in patients with psychosis. Patients were recruited from the PRONIA-FP7 (EU-funded study to develop prognostic tools for early psychosis); the project investigates whether it is mediated by the mesolimbic system. For her research, she developed a machine learning algorithm to determine whether the social defeat status can predict the gray matter volume reductions in the regions of interest.
Zara Sadiq
I completed BSc Psychology from Aston University, I have since gained experience working with diverse populations across mental health settings. I am currently working as an assistant research psychologist responsible for promotion and recruitment of the ADEPP clinical trial under the supervision of Professor Upthegrove.
Postgraduate Researchers
Alex Murray
Alex graduated with a BSC (Hons) in Psychology with Neuroscience from the University of Sussex in 2018. Following this he completed an MSc in Genes, Environment and Development in Psychology and Psychiatry at King’s College London which he graduated with distinction in 2019. While studying in London Alex worked closely with the PSYSCAN team, using EEG to assess early phase psychosis and helped to train research staff in the use of EEG in their own work. Alex's PhD focuses on inflammation and oxidative stress in psychosis as part of the PIMS project. Using 1H-MRS in subjects with early psychosis, chronic schizophrenia and healthy controls to examine the clinical and neuroanatomical relevance and relationship between inflammatory state, oxidative stress and defence in the early stages of illness.
Connor Dunleavy
Connor Dunleavy is a second year PhD student within the School of Sport, Exercise, and Rehabilitation Sciences/School of Psychology, at the University of Birmingham. Connor's main research interest focuses on inflammatory abnormalities that are present in first episode psychosis and Schizophrenia, and how these changes may relate to negative symptom emergence in particular. Specifically, Connor is using induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs) as a cell-based model for investigating inflammatory perturbations in schizophrenia pathology. These cells are taken from patients with schizophrenia, and retain the genetic signature of the donor - therefore iPSCs can be differentiated from stem cells into specific brain cell types, enabling the study of schizophrenia brain cell development, and inflammatory abnormalities in vitro. Further, Connor is currently designing an exercise intervention that will be implemented within a first episode psychosis population in order to investigate the anti-inflammatory effects of physical activity, and how this may relate to changes in negative symptom severity, for which effective therapeutic medication is currently lacking.
Fabiana Corsi-Zuelli
Fabiana is a BSN, MSc, PhD student in Neuroscience at the University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto Medical School, Brazil, and Visiting PhD student at the University of Birmingham, UK. Fabiana is interested in the interconnection between the immune and central nervous systems, trying to disentangle immune mechanisms of psychosis. She completed her MSc in Neuroscience in 2019, supervised by Dr Cristina Del-Ben with a joint scholarship at King’s College London with Dr Valeria Mondelli, studying the interplay between child trauma, low-grade inflammation, and psychosis. During her PhD, she investigates associations between low-grade inflammation, cannabis, and the psychosis continuum model in a Brazilian sample in collaboration with Dr Marta Di Forti and Dr Diego Quattrone (King’s College London). She is also interested in the interaction between the adaptive and innate immune systems, particularlyTreg-related mechanisms and the intersection with brain, body, and environment relevant to psychosis development. She has been studying and writing about it with my mentor Prof. Bill Deakin (University of Manchester). She is looking forward to the next steps of her career development in immunopsychiatry, including a one-year PhD research visit at the University of Birmingham to work with Professors Rachel Upthegrove and Nicholas Barnes on immune cell-based research as part of the PIMS project.
Fabiana receives national and international Fellowships from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). She received prestigious awards from distinguished societies, including the Society for Biological Psychiatry (SOBP), the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP), the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO), and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS).
Link to publications.
Chloe Clifford
I am a recent graduate with an MSc in Mental Health from the University of Birmingham and a BSc (Hons) in Neuroscience from the University of Nottingham. I am currently a first year PhD student, within the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) at the University of Birmingham, investigating inflammation and neurobiological dysfunction in individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis, under the supervision of Dr Rogers and Professor Upthegrove. My project aims to explore whether mediators of inflammation and the innate immune response are associated with changes in brain-related neurobiological mechanistic processes before psychosis onset.
After completing my MSc dissertation, investigating grey matter volume alterations and innate inflammatory markers in first-episode psychosis, I have developed an interest in how the immune system can interact with the peripheral and central nervous system during the onset and transition to psychosis and related psychiatric conditions. I am particularly passionate about youth mental health and better characterising and treating individuals that are considered ‘at-risk’ for developing mental illness – to postpone or prevent the onset and maintenance of psychiatric disorders and to further reduce longer-term mental health outcomes.
Gemini Katwa
Gemini's PhD research hopes to extend our knowledge and understanding of structural and functional neuronal networks involved in decision-making in the neurological conditions of schizophrenia and psychopathy. Decision neuroscience aims to uncover these circuits and create a map of decision-making processes. The uncovering of networks will ultimately lead to an increase in understanding and eventually improved diagnosis and treatment of disorders including schizophrenia and psychopathy. It is therefore vital to the improvement of psychological care that we uncover the underlying structure of decision-making networks.