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Dr. Yirmiya is an honorary senior research fellow in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and the Anna Freud Centre. She received her Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan University, Israel, in 2022. Her doctoral research investigated the role of caregiving as well as stress- and affiliation-related hormones in mental health problems among adolescents who have experienced chronic war-related trauma.
During her postdoctoral work at UCL, Dr. Yirmiya has played a central role in two large-scale NIHR-funded clinical trials. The first is the COSI trial, which investigates an attachment-based intervention to improve perinatal mental health and the early parent-infant relationship. The second, the MOAM study, explores mentalisation-based treatment (MBT) for adult male offenders, examining transdiagnostic psychological mechanisms and therapeutic change. Currently, she is leading the MentiParent project, a novel AI-based chatbot designed to enhance parental reflective functioning through simulated parent-child interactions and real-time mentalisation-informed feedback. In addition, she is a co-lead of the ARFI project (Attachment and Reflective Functioning Interviews), which uses Large Language Models to evaluate reflective functioning in Adult Attachment Interviews.
Dr. Yirmiya’s research integrates longitudinal, multi-method approaches—linking biomarkers, clinical assessments, and interview-based measures—to better understand intergenerational transmission of trauma, perinatal mental health, and developmental psychopathology. She is particularly interested in mechanisms such as reflective functioning and epistemic trust, and their role in shaping resilience across the lifespan.
She is a member of the Future Leadership Group of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS) and of the Section of Perinatal Personality Disorder and Parents with PD within the European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD).
Alongside her research, Dr. Yirmiya is a trained clinical psychologist with expertise in infant and early childhood therapy, and she is actively involved in developing and evaluating novel, trauma-informed interventions for high-risk families.