Meet the Team
Our group is led by Eirini Flouri, Professor of Developmental Psychology and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS). We are a nice bunch of researchers at both post-doctoral and doctoral levels. Together we aim to better understand factors in the mental, emotional, and physical well-being of children and adolescents, and to deliver excellent science. To achieve this, we are collaborating with other internal and external researchers. Our team is always growing, so please do get in touch if you are interested in joining us.
Prof Eirini FlouriProfessor of Developmental Psychology
Prof Eirini Flouri received her PhD in psychology in 2000 from the University of Exeter. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Oxford from 2000 to 2004 and joined the UCL Institute of Education in 2005. She is interested in understanding the causes of children’s emotional and behavioural problems. Complementing her previous work on the role of family context (parenting, parental mental illness, and poverty) and the broader context (neighbourhood and school contexts), her current research starts to explore the role of biological factors, such as inflammation, in the development of emotional and behavioural problems in children and adolescents.
|
Dr Emily MidouhasAssociate Professor
Dr Emily Midouhas has been a Lecturer in Psychology at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute of Education since 2015. Prior to this, she completed both a postdoctoral research fellowship and a PhD in Developmental Psychology at the UCL Institute of Education. She obtained an M.Sc. in Organisational and Social Psychology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to embarking on an academic career, she worked in educational assessment and policy in the USA. Her research interests centre on the effects of social, economic, and physical characteristics of residential neighbourhoods and schools on mental health and resilience across childhood.
|
Dr Steven PapachristouLecturer
Dr Steven Papachristou is a lecturer at the Department of Psychology and Human Development, UCL Institute of Education. In 2013 he obtained a PhD in psychiatric epidemiology from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Between 2014 and 2019 he worked as a research associate for the British Regional Heart Study group and the CUBIC Lab at UCL on research projects funded mainly by the ESRC, NIHR and Dunhill Medical Trust. His main research interests include the cognitive and behavioural developmental processes underlying mental health and the advanced analytical techniques for longitudinal study designs. He is currently leading modules in research methods and statistics for UCL's BA programme Psychology with Education, is actively engaged in several ongoing research projects of the CuBIC lab and supervises four PhD students.
|
Dr Marta FrancesconiLecturer
Dr Marta Francesconi is a lecturer at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute of Education. She received her PhD in Clinical-Experimental Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, Sapienza, University of Rome in 2017. During her PhD programme she was trained in the clinical, functional, neurocognitive, social cognitive, and neurological soft signs assessment of the psychiatric patients, with a specific focus on early detection and treatment of psychosis and mood disorders. Her research interest is in clinically-oriented research fields related to children's and young adults’ mental health. She is particularly interested in the identification of biomarkers that are predictive of mental health disorders and cognitive deficits in children and adolescents.
|
PhD students
Miss Francesca BentivegnaPhD Student
Francesca Bentivegna is a PhD student on the UCL-Birkbeck MRC Doctoral Training Programme at UCL. She holds a BSc in Psychology from University of Padua (Italy) and was awarded an Erasmus+ scholarship to study social psychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She then moved to London where she achieved a MSc in Clinical Mental Health Sciences at UCL. Prior to her PhD, she gained experience as honorary assistant psychologist, research assistant, and learning support assistant. Her PhD project currently focuses on the aetiological role of reward processing in the context of mental health problems. Specifically, she aims to build a statistical model to explain potential pathways among internalising and externalising symptoms, self-regulation, and reward processing in childhood and adolescence. She is supervised by Prof Eirini Flouri and Dr Steven Papachristou.
|
Dr Dimitris I. TsomokosPhD Student
Dr Dimitris I. Tsomokos is an external associate of the CUBIC lab currently completing an MSc from the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glasgow. He obtained an MPhys (2000, University of Essex) and a PhD (2004, University of Bradford) in theoretical physics, and was awarded a personal EPSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Theoretical Physics (2006-2009), followed by an EPSRC funded postdoctoral research position at Royal Holloway, University of London (2009-2011). From 2011 to 2022 he held various R&D and senior product management positions at Oracle, a global leader in autonomous databases, cloud-based software, and innovative technologies, specialising in personalised marketing using machine learning. In 2015 he co-founded Alphablocks Nursery School, an OFSTED-outstanding setting in North London, where he now works as Director of Research. He also works as a Head of Product at Parenting Matters Ltd, a spin-off from the National Academy for Parenting Research at King’s College London, led by Prof. Stephen Scott. Dimitris’ main interests include social cognition and trust, their impact on child and adolescent mental health, sleep and the built environment, and early learning.
|
Miss Francesca Del Gaudio |
Miss Jane Hahn |
PhD Student
|
PhD Student
|
Miss Bahar DastanPhD Student
|
Miss Georgia CronshawPhD Student
Georgia Cronshaw is a PhD student at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute for Education, supervised by Eirini Flouri, Peninah Murage and Emily Midouhas. Prior to her PhD, she obtained a BSc in Biological Sciences: Cell Biology at UCL and worked as a research assistant at the University of East London, here she investigated the pathways through homelessness for autistic women and developed a training package for homelessness service providers to improve autism awareness. She also works as a board member for a C.I.C supporting the educational outcomes of children who have experienced adversity in childhood. Her PhD project currently focuses on the role of the built environment on child mental health and cognition.
|
Collaborators
Dr Keri WongAssistant Professor
Dr Keri Wong is currently an Assistant Professor in Psychology (Lecturer) at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the University College London. Her research focuses on the development and causes of antisocial and aggressive behaviours and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, primarily focusing on childhood suspiciousness (or social mistrust) and schizotypal personality traits. She has a keen interest in developing culturally-appropriate tools for assessing young people’s mental wellbeing. Prior to moving to London, she was the Betty Behrens Research Fellow (JRF) at Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge where she led her own line of research. This included developing the first dimensional assessment of childhood paranoia/suspiciousness, the Social Mistrust Scale.
|
Dr Amy HarrisonAssociate Professor
Dr Amy Harrison is an Associate Professor in Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at University College London and a Clinical Psychologist. She completed her PhD and clinical psychology training (DClinPsy) at King’s College London where her research focused on cognitive styles and social emotional functioning in eating disorders. She has worked in, and developed eating disorder services for children and adolescents and adults in the NHS, supporting both people with eating disorders and their carers. Her current research involves the experimental investigation of social skills in people with eating disorders and developing novel interventions to help people to use their social skills more efficiently as a key means of accessing and using social support in their recovery.
|
Dr Liz HalsteadLecturer
|
Dr Youyou WuLecturer
Dr Youyou Wu is a Lecturer in Psychology at University College London (UCL), Faculty of Education and Society (IOE), Department of Psychology and Human Development. She obtained her PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge and completed her postdoctoral training at Northwestern University. Dr Wu employs computational methods like machine learning and natural language processing to study personality expression in the digital space. As a psychologist of this generation, she is also drawn to metascience and methodology, and particularly reproducibility. She has used machine learning to predict which scientific findings in psychology are reproducible and trustworthy. Her work has appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature Communications, and Psychological Science. It has been covered by global outlets like BBC, New York Times, and the Economist.
|
Dr Miriam McBreen
Lecturer
Dr Miriam McBreen is a Lecturer in Psychology at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, and a member of UCL’s Centre for Inclusive Education. She received her PhD in Educational Psychology from McGill University. Her research focuses on understanding the links between reading motivation and reading development, and on identifying teaching approaches that foster the motivation, engagement and learning of pupils with reading difficulties.
Alumni
Dr Alister BairdFormer PhD Student
Dr Alister Baird graduated from Cardiff University in 2015 with a BA in journalism and cultural studies. After this he completed a conversion MSc in psychology at Coventry University. Since, he has been a researcher on the DEFINE project at Cardiff University, exploring the psychiatric and physical health difficulties associated with rare genetic disorders in adults and children. His interests include exploring the aetiologies of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) and rare atypical genetic syndromes, as well as elucidating how we can manage behavioural difficulties in these individuals. His PhD at UCL researched how environmental factors may mediate and alleviate challenging behaviours in children with these NDDs.
|
Dr Marie MüllerFormer PhD Student
Dr Marie Müller completed her PhD in April 2023. Under the supervision of Eirini Flouri, she investigated the association between neighbourhood greenspace and children's and adolescents' mental health and well-being in the UK, using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study and Understanding Society. Marie is now a Research Fellow in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the UCL Division of Psychiatry. She uses data from cohort studies (including the Tokyo Teen Cohort and ALSPAC) and electronic health records (the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, CPRD) to investigate the cross-sectional and longitudinal association between academic pressure and depressive symptoms, anxiety, and self-harm in secondary-school students.
|
Dr Iris JiFormer PhD Student
Dr Iris (Dongying) Ji was a first-year PhD student in developmental psychology, supervised by Eirini Flouri and Steven Papachristou. Before coming to the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute of Education, she graduated from the University of York in 2018 with a degree in Psychology in Education. Her research focused on the deficits of emotion recognition, theory of mind, and emotion regulation in childhood associated with later emotional or behavioural problems. She was particularly interested in the roles of inflammation and cortisol underlying the link between social cognition and mental health.
|
Dr Ye KuangFormer PhD Student
Dr Ye Kuang was a Trainee Educational Psychologist on the Educational Psychology (Professional Educational, Child and Adolescent Psychology) doctorate programme at the UCL Institute of Education. She obtained an M.Sc. in Psychology of Education from the UCL Institute of Education and an M.A. in Education from Durham University. She worked as a language teacher in London prior to the doctorate programme, and she is currently with the School Community Psychology Service in Wandsworth. Her research interests are around the interaction between children and adolescents’ social, emotional, and mental health needs and their cognitive development.
|
Dr Maria SifakiFormer PhD Student
Dr Maria Sifaki was a PhD student in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute of Education, supervised by Emily Midouhas and Eirini Flouri. Her PhD explored the bi-directional relationships between fathers’ psychological distress and child development. Before beginning her PhD, she obtained an MSc in Psychology of Education from the UCL Institute of Education, in 2017, and an MSc in Foundations in Clinical Psychology and Health Services from Goldsmiths College, in 2016.
|
Dr Xiaodi ChenFormer PhD Student
Dr Xiaodi Chen was a PhD student at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute of Education, supervised by Eirini Flouri and Therese Hesketh. Prior to her PhD, she obtained an MSc in Child development at UCL in 2018. Her PhD research focused on the associations of educational aspirations and educational expectations with mental health problems in left-behind children in China. She was particularly interested in understanding the role of family and school in children’s emotional and behavioural problems.
|
Former PhD Student
Dr Dora Kokosi was a PhD student at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at the UCL Institute of Education, supervised by Eirini Flouri and Emily Midouhas. Prior to her postgraduate studies, she obtained her master’s degree in Child Development at UCL in 2016. Dora worked as an Assistant Psychologist in Greece in the past, and she worked – in parallel to her PhD studies – as a recurrent Research Assistant in projects that focus on the prospective relationships between air pollution, child development, inflammation, and psychological distress. Her PhD examined the role of inflammation in the association of socio-economic differences with child cognitive development.
|
Former PhD Student
Maria was a psychology graduate from Birkbeck, University of London. After receiving an MSc in Genes, Environment and Development in Psychology and Psychiatry from King’s College London in 2018, she stayed on and worked as a research assistant, investigating the relationship between depression, inflammation and early life trauma. Maria has experience in genetic epidemiology and statistical genetics, including polygenic risk score analysis, with a particular focus on major depressive disorder. She also holds a BA in English Language and Literature from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In September 2020, Maria had joined the group to start her PhD, under the supervision of Dr Steven Papachristou, Dr Emma Meaburn and Professor Eirini Flouri, to investigate the potential causal links and shared genetic basis between educational attainment, depression and inflammation.
|