I'm a clinical psychology researcher, working in Tim Dalgleish's lab alongside Rebecca Lawson's PaL Lab. My research asks how becoming mentally unwell changes who we are, and what makes people vulnerable to mental health difficulties across diagnoses.

Much of my current work explores the first question through grief for the lost self. People living with many different mental health conditions describe grieving the person they were before they became unwell. Yet this experience has been largely overlooked in both research and therapy. In our studies, around eight in ten people with a mental health condition say who they are has profoundly changed, and at least half say they miss or grieve who they were before. This grief tends to be strongest when people are most unwell. I'm now exploring whether it eases with therapy, how it connects to suicide risk and to the way people remember their own past, and how treatment could help with it directly.

To understand what makes people vulnerable, I also study intolerance of uncertainty, which means finding it very hard to cope with not knowing what will happen. It plays a part in anxiety, depression and many other conditions. I help lead a clinical trial that compares how psychotherapy may change our ability to tolerate uncertainty with the aim of better understanding how and why therapy works.

Both strands mean looking past diagnostic labels, which calls for new ways of making sense of mental health data. I combine a range of methods to do this, from clinical interviews and questionnaires to brain imaging and machine learning approaches.