Specialization
Psychiatry; Psychiatric epidemiology; Gene–environment interplay; Social determinants of mental health; Childhood trauma and adversity; PTSD and stress-related disorders; Psychosis and bipolar disorder; Genetics and genomics; Epigenetics and DNA methylation; Intergenerational transmission of mental health; Socioeconomic disadvantage and mental health; Precision psychiatry; Causal inference; Population cohorts and registry data; Mental health research
Focus of research
I am a psychiatrist and researcher with a longstanding interest in understanding how social and environmental experiences shape mental health across the life course.
My research combines psychiatry, epidemiology, genetics and molecular biology to study how adversity—including childhood trauma, poverty and other social determinants—becomes biologically embedded and influences the development, treatment and transmission of psychiatric disorders. Rather than viewing mental illness as solely genetic or environmental, my work focuses on the complex interplay between biological predisposition and the environments in which people grow up and live.
Earlier in my career, my research centred on trauma, psychosis and epigenetics. Together with national and international collaborators, I helped demonstrate how traumatic experiences leave measurable biological signatures, how these changes relate to stress resilience and vulnerability, and how successful treatment can partially reverse some of these molecular changes.
My current work has expanded towards the societal determinants of mental health. I lead and contribute to projects investigating how socioeconomic disadvantage influences access to psychiatric care, pharmacological treatment and long-term outcomes, and how social inequality is transmitted across generations through behavioural, biological and developmental pathways. By integrating large population cohorts, genomic data, electronic health records and causal inference methods, we aim to identify mechanisms that can inform both clinical practice and public policy.
Ultimately, my goal is to bridge biological psychiatry with public mental health, translating insights from molecular science, genetics and epidemiology into better prevention, more equitable treatment and improved mental health care.