I'm a child and adolescent psychiatrist and clinical senior research fellow here at the University of Glasgow. Clinically, I work in NHS Ayrshire and Arran in the CAMHS Urgent Assessment and Intensive Treatment Team (CUAIT). 

Prior to this I've been a senior clinical lecturer at the Division of Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh, and consultant psychiatrist at the CAMHS Melville Inpatient Unit, NHS Lothian. 

I've taken the long way round to psychiatry, having first done a degree in Cybernetics, and PhD in Neuroinformatics (Thesis: The functional neuroanatomy of action selection in schizophrenia). 

When I'm not revelling in neuroscience, you'll find me on my motorbike, crocheting, singing, and generally bodging away, although rarely at the same time. 

My research focuses on applying computational methods to neuroimaging datasets for the purposes of developing a more mechanistic understanding of mental illness, particularly during the prodromal phase.

I'm especially interested in understanding how flexible thinking and personal autonomy can be maintained and bolstered despite illness. I hope this will better guide the development of new treatments, and aid young people in making individual choices during their recoveries.

I hope to bring brain-informative objective measures into the clinical, to help people understand their experiences, their strengths, how therapeutic engagement is working for them, and to steer optimal therapeutic pathways. 

Keywords: fMRI; Bayesian belief updating, predictive coding and the free energy principle; reinforcement learning; EEG; autonomy; adolescent mental health. 

Google Scholar profile 

PhD Co-supervisor: Jeffrey Scholes, University of Edinburgh. 

PhD Co-supervisor: Gladi Thng. "Leveraging large-scale genetic and neuroimaging data for the study of Major Depressive Disorder: Towards mechanistic insights and personalised approaches" (2024), University of Edinburgh.

Selected international presentations

• 2023: Early Intervention in Psychiatry 14 (Lausanne, Switzerland)
• 2023: Organisation for Human Brain Mapping (Montreal, Canada)