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UCL Excellence Fellows 2023-24
Dr Jessie Baldwin (UCL/Rosetrees Excellence Fellow)
Jessie is a psychiatric epidemiologist interested in understanding environmental influences on childhood mental health problems. Her research to date has focused largely on the role of adverse childhood experiences in mental health problems, using causal inference methods and large epidemiological datasets. Jessie did her PhD at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre, King’s College London, and was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCL in 2019. For her UCL Excellence Fellowship, Jessie will focus on understanding how to interrupt the intergenerational transmission of mental health problems. This will involve identifying environmental factors that mitigate or exacerbate the intergenerational transmission of mental health problems. To do so, she will use innovative causal inference methods, such as natural experiments, family designs, and randomised control trials. Through this research, Jessie hopes to identify modifiable targets for interventions to prevent the intergenerational transmission of mental health problems.
Dr Rory Gibb (Wolfson UCL Excellence Fellow)
Rory Gibb is a computational biologist based in UCL's Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment. His research seeks to understand how climatic, ecological and social forces interact to shape patterns of infectious disease in people and wildlife. To achieve this his work leverages large-scale datasets on infection, ecosystems and environment, which to date has provided insights into the ecology of zoonotic spillover and the epidemiology of significant zoonotic and vector-borne diseases including dengue and Lassa fever. As an Excellence Fellow he will develop data and models to assess and attribute the emerging present-day impacts of climate and ecosystem change on the burden of wildlife-borne zoonoses. This work aims to provide new understanding of the predictability of climate change impacts across diverse disease systems, and develop evidence to support human health resilience to the impacts of environmental change.
Alan Thompson (Dean of the Faculty of Brain Sciences and Chair of the 2023 Excellence Fellowships panel) said:
“I would like to congratulate Rory and Jessie who have recently been awarded these highly prestigious fellowships following a competitive round of funding. The UCL Excellence Fellowships underline UCL’s commitment to developing the research leaders of tomorrow and supporting their innovative research. The candidates coming to interview are truly extraordinary and I hope we will be able to continue and expand this exciting programme in the years ahead.”