Every year we ask our new intake of undergraduate psychology students in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences to get into small groups and choose a researcher they want to meet.
Watch the videos and read the text below to find out more about the researchers participating in Meet the Researcher for 2019/20. You can also read which programmes they are available to meet students from.
Duncan Brumby

- BSc Psychology
Mark Cooper
My research relates to understanding the disease mechanisms of Parkinson's disease. We still don't know the cause of Parkinson's in most patients, however in the brains of all patients there are characteristic protein aggregates and I'm studying how these protein aggregates spread in the brains of patients as the disease progresses.
- BSc Psychology
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Anna Cox
My research investigates the positive and negative impacts of our mobile devices on our ability to get our work done and to successfully manage our work-life balance.
- BSc Psychology
Bronwen Evans
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Pasco Fearon
My main interest is in trying to understand the driving forces behind child development, particularly in relation to children’s emotional development. I’m fascinated by the interplay that seems to happen between genetic factors and the social environment – particularly experiences in early caregiving relationships.
- BSc Psychology
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Janet Feigenbaum
My primary research interests are in the development of improved interventions for the treatment of personality disorder. My current research focusses on adaptations of Dialectical Behavioural Therapy and Cognitive Behaivoural Therapy for a wider range of presentations and comorbidity with personality disorder.
- BSc Psychology
Peter Fonagy
My research work has largely focused on the integration of psychodynamic theoretical and clinical work with empirical research strategies in the areas of early emotional development and psychosocial treatment research, engaging specifically with severe personality pathology. I co-developed mentalization-based treatment, an innovative research-based dynamic therapeutic approach. I am also engaged in a major collaborative programme exploring developmental psychopathology from an attachment-mentalization perspective.
- BSc Psychology
Katerina Fotopoulou
Katerina heads KatLab, a group of researchers that focus on topics and disorders that lie at the borders between neurology and psychology and challenge any rigid distinction between mind and body.
- BSc Psychology
John Greenwood
- BSc Psychology
Lasana Harris
- BSc Psychology
Mark Huckvale
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Sunjeev Kamboj
Our team uses psychophysiological measurements to look at the role of ‘maladaptive learning and memory’ in addictions and anxiety disorders. Both of these types of disorder involve unhelpful patterns of behaviour which have been learned through, for example, classical conditioning. It turns out that it might be possible to reverse these unhelpful behaviours by retraining people to form more adaptive associations.
- BSc Psychology
John King
Mental health disorders, such as depression and anxiety, involve problems in the way memory functions. We use techniques including brain imaging, electrophysiology and virtual reality to investigate memory processes in healthy and unwell people. By understanding how these processes fail, we aim to find new ways to improve mental health.
- BSc Psychology
James Kirkbride
My research is in the field of psychiatric epidemiology. Epidemiology is a discipline which investigates the causes of disease at a population level. I apply epidemiological and statistical methods to large datasets of people with mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, to discover whether there is a link between our environment and our risk of developing mental health disorders.
- BSc Psychology
Glyn Lewis
People who have experienced stressors in their life are more likely to develop depression. These stressors include bullying, earthquakes, deployment to war and bereavement. I am interested why individuals vary so much in how they respond to stressors...
- BSc Psychology
William Mandy
NB: William Mandy is on sabbatical
My work aims to improve the recognition of autism, and to develop new interventions to help autistic people. I have a particular research interest in improving the identification and care of females on the autism spectrum, who are currently at high risk of going unnoticed and unhelped by clinical and educational services.
- BSc Psychology
Eamon McCrory
I co-direct the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit at UCL. Our research focuses on early adversity and behavioural problems in childhood. My research uses brain imaging and psychological approaches to investigate the mechanisms associated with developmental adversity and resilience.
- BSc Psychology
Steve Pilling
My research interests include: health services research, including trials of complex interventions such as crisis intervention teams and implementation studies of health service policy initiatives; psychological treatment, in particular treatments for depression and the competences required to deliver effective interventions for all psychological treatments and disorders; systematic reviews in mental health and their use in clinical guidelines; clinical guideline development and implementation in mental health.
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Jenni Rodd
I study the different cognitive skills that adults use to understand the meanings of spoken and written words. The long-term goal is to understand the specific difficulties faced by individual children and adults who find comprehension more difficult, and then develop targeted interventions that help them improve their comprehension skills.
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Jonathan Roiser
Our aim is to understand the neurobiological mechanisms underlying psychiatric symptoms. We utilise experimental techniques drawn from cognitive psychology, functional neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, and computational modelling, both in patient populations and healthy volunteers.
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
- BSc Psychology
Stuart Rosen
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Giampietro Schiavo
- BSc Psychology
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Gabriella Vigliocco
- BSc Psychology
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
David Vinson
- BSc Psychology
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Amanda William
Pain is not just a physical event, or a sensation: it is also an emotional event – if it were not unpleasant and aversive, it would not be pain. It is defined as both a sensory and emotional experience, without any requirement for a detectable disease or lesion, since much pain is produced by changes in the central and peripheral nervous system.
- BSc Psychology
Bencie Woll
I study the communication of deaf people as a model for understanding language, cognition, and the brain. My research includes studies of spoken and signed language acquisition, linguistic and sociolinguistic research on sign languages, functional imaging of signed and spoken language processing by deaf and hearing people, and developmental and acquired sign language impairments.
- BSc Psychology
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences
Vitor Zimmerer
I study the language profile of neurological disorders such as dementia, stroke aphasia and schizophrenia. Language capacity is very sensitive to neurological change and is therefore an important marker of damage, degeneration or alterations in the neurotransmission. Linguistic assessments can help with diagnosis and tracking of neurological change over time, for example as a response to intervention. I pay particular attention to lexical and grammatical processing, and have developed new methods with the aim to improve clinical procedure.
- BSc Psychology
- BSc Psychology and Language Sciences