It’s been quite a week for the PsyLife lab. First off, we’re delighted to say that one of our PhD students – Jen Dykxhoorn – successfully passed her PhD upgrade at UCL. While we weren’t surprised by this, it reflects a huge amount of work Jen has put in to her PhD on migration and psychosis in the first year. She’s currently writing up some results from her first study on this topic, which we’ll be submitting soon for publication. Jen has developed a great program of research as part of her PhD over the next 3 years, which we’re very excited about. Congrats Jen! Jen’s research is funded by Mental Health Research UK, with subsidiary funding from the Royal Society and Wellcome Trust.
We’re also delighted to announce that another PhD student – Jean Stafford – has joined the group to do a mixed epidemiological and psychological PhD on old age psychosis. She’ll be co-supervised by Dr James Kirkbride and Prof Rob Howard in the Division of Psychiatry. Jean spent 3-months with us last year as part of her MRC-sponsored first year PhD rotation scheme. Welcome along Jean!
We also welcome Dr Daria Monteforte from the University of Verona who joins us for a 6-month research visit. Daria is a psychiatrist specialising in psychosis. She’ll be gaining research experience during her visit with us. You can read more about what Daria’s up to here.
The PsyLife group would also like to pass on its congratulations to the MSc students who did student projects with us in 2015-16. All the projects we supervised addressed interesting epidemiological and mental health service issues with respect to psychosis, and we were impressed by the overall quality. Hopefully several of these will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication in the coming months. Dawid Gondek begins a PhD in longitudinal epidemiology of healthy ageing at the Institute of Education with Professor George Ploubidis, while Lucy Richardson has joined the REACH study with Professor Craig Morgan at the IoPPN as a Research Assistant. Mohammedi Abdolali continues his clinical work as a psychiatrist, armed with new insights from his MSc experiences. Finally, well done to Tom Steare, who continues his studies in mental health.
On a final note, a major publication from the PsyLife group has been published this week in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The paper investigates the epidemiology of first episode psychotic disorders, as seen through Early Intervention in Psychosis services in a rural population in England. Until now, very little epidemiological research has been conducted in EIP settings or in rural populations, and this study is an attempt to fill this gap. The paper has also been covered by Psychiatric News.