Professor Lucy Bowes
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Professor Lucy Bowes is the PI of the oRANGE Lab. Lucy graduated with a BA Hons in Experimental Psychology from Oxford University in 2004. She was awarded a PhD in Behavioural Genetics in 2011 from the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Lucy is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, and was appointed as a Fellow of Magdalen College in 2014. She tutors in prelims Psychology and Part 1 Individual Differences and Psychological Disorders. Lucy has received awards from the Medical Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, UK. Her research on school bullying has been supported by the Jacobs Foundation, and her current work on resilience to harsh, non-supportive parenting is supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.
Lucy’s research focuses on the impact of early life stress on psychological and behavioural development. In particular, Lucy has focused on the effects of victimization on young people’s adjustment and wellbeing. Her research integrates methods from social epidemiology, developmental psychology and behavioural genetics in order to understand the complex genetic and environmental influences that promote resilience to victimization and early life stress. The aim of her work is to guide intervention work by identifying protective factors that promote positive outcomes among vulnerable children. Email: lucy.bowes@psy.ox.ac.uk |
Urska Kosir
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Urška is a DPhil student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Her doctoral work focuses on the psychological adaptation of young cancer survivors. Urška is exploring the mechanisms of psychopathology in young survivors to answer questions such as why some survivors become depressed, anxious, or experience PTSD, and in what ways biology, environment, and personal characteristics interact in the development of mental health disorders. Urška’s employs mixed methods, from longitudinal data set analyses to qualitative examination of young survivors’ experiences. She hopes that her results will lead to the development of novel screening approaches as well as preventative measures in pediatric oncology settings.
Prior to moving to Oxford, Urška obtained a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Yale University. Most of her work at Yale fell under the umbrella of mental health; from understanding autism to the exploration of depression symptom clusters and how they might be utilized in prescribing antidepressant medication. Upon graduating, Urška worked as a research assistant in a psychosis lab at Yale Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry. Urška’s primary occupation was data collection and analysis for a clinical trial that explored the use of Naltrexone as weight gain prevention for patients with psychotic disorders. Email: urska.kosir@psy.ox.ac.uk |
Michelle Degli Esposti
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Michelle graduated with a B.A. Hons in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford in 2014. Following this worked as an Assistant Psychologist within Guernsey’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health, and as a Research Assistant for two leading clinically-oriented Research Groups: the Oxford Psychological Medicine Service (PMS) and the Oxford Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma (OxCADAT).
Michelle started her D.Phil in Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, in October 2015. Her D.Phil is part of an innovative interdisciplinary project, combining History and Psychology, and investigating Childhood Adversity and Life-time Resilience. Her particular research focus is on better understanding life-course pathways of resilience following childhood maltreatment. Michelle also continues to work part-time within OxCADAT on a Mind funded project on building resilience in emergency service workers. These different strands of research converge in helping to better understand resilience in the face of adversity, and how this understanding can be constructively used in the clinical and policy-making world. Email: michelle.degliesposti@psy.ox.ac.uk |
Amanda Sim
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Amanda is a DPhil student in Social Intervention and an International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development and Jacobs Foundation Fellow. She holds a MA in International Development from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a summa cum laude BA in Psychology and Romance Languages from New York University. Amanda previously worked as a Research and Evaluation Coordinator at the International Rescue Committee, where she conducted research on the causes and effects of violence against women and children, and the effectiveness of parenting and mental health interventions in humanitarian settings. She has over ten years of experience in research and programme implementation and evaluation in conflict-affected countries, including Uganda, Afghanistan, Liberia, Ethiopia, Lebanon and the Thai-Burmese border.
Amanda’s doctoral research uses mixed methods to investigate the effects of war trauma and displacement-related stressors on parenting practices and parental and child mental health among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. The ultimate aim of this research is to inform the development, implementation and evaluation of a culturally and contextually-grounded parenting intervention to promote children’s resilience to the adverse effects of war and displacement. Email: amanda.sim@wolfson.ox.ac.uk |
Charlotte Booth
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Charlotte is currently in the second year of her DPhil in Experimental Psychology, which she is undertaking in the OCEAN lab, and is co-supervised by Elaine Fox and Lucy Bowes. Her doctoral thesis will be based on the topic of 'Individual differences in environmental sensitivity'. She is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between environmental stress and mental health outcomes - and the individual difference factors that moderate this relationship, including personality factors and genotypic factors. She will use data from the CogBIAS longitudinal study (currently beginning wave two data collection) to investigate risk and resilience pathways to mental health outcomes in a cohort of 500 adolescents. She will also conduct behavioural and intervention experiments to investigate why some people are more responsive to the environment than others. Email: charlotte.booth@psy.ox.ac.uk |
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Previous lab members
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Dr. Elizabeth Braithwaite graduated with a BSc Hons in Neuroscience from Cardiff University in 2011. During her undergraduate degree, Liz completed an industrial placement year at Eli Lilly, where she worked within the behavioural pharmacology research team. She was awarded a D.Phil in Psychiatry from Oxford University in 2015. Her D.Phil research was funded by the MRC, and focused on the effects of maternal depression during pregnancy on fetal and infant development. Liz is now a Senior Researcher in Stress at Staffordshire University.
Liz's current research focuses on the effects of early life stress on the development of later mental health difficulties, and her research has two main aims. The first aim is to further understand the biological mechanisms that underpin the development of psychological difficulties following stress exposure, and the second aim is to identify factors which may protect against the development of such mental health difficulties in the context of early life stress. Critically, both streams of research are necessary in order to develop new intervention and prevention strategies. Email: elizabeth.braithwaite@psy.ox.ac.uk |