Professor Lucy Bowes
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Professor Lucy Bowes is a Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology and the Principal Investigator 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 |
Dr. Julia Badger
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Dr Julia Badger is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Experimental Psychology. Julia is also a Lecturer for the Department and the Psychology Tutor for Harris Manchester College. Her work in the oRANGE lab focuses on using virtual reality technologies to investigate how adolescents respond psychologically and physiologically to bullying situations. The work assesses whether adolescents at risk of depression, anxiety and / or psychosis are more likely to exhibit hostile interpretations and heightened reactions. This work forms part of a larger study into factors associated with resilience and mental health. Julia is also part of the first U.K. multi-site KiVa (anti-bullying) programme research study to evaluate the effectiveness of KiVa in reducing bullying & victimisation in primary schools.
Julia also leads a global virtual reality network (Virtual Minds) to link researchers, practitioners and developers working with applied virtual reality. She graduated with a BSc Hons in Human Psychology and an MRes in Psychological Research Methods with a specialisation in Cognitive Neuroscience. In 2011, she was awarded a PhD in Child Development from Aston University. Following her PhD she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in a Family Assessment Service based at the Anna Freud Centre, London, following up the psychological well-being of children who had gone through court proceedings. Since moving to Oxford in 2013, Julia’s work has been primarily focused on co-developing educational tools to identify children’s academic potential and to work with those children who are underachieving at school relative to their potential. Julia (nom de plume Julia Tedd) published her first children's book - Night-time Cat - in 2019 and her second children's book - Box Cat - in 2020. They are the first two books in a planned series which aims to subtly expose children to complex grammar structures to encourage early implicit acquisition (see juliatedd.com). Email: julia.badger@psy.ox.ac.uk Twitter: @JuliaRBadger LinkedIn: JuliaBadger |
Dr. Sînziana Oncioiu
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Dr. Sînziana I. Oncioiu is a Calleva Centre Postdoctoral Research Associate at Magdalen College since December 2020. Her work in the oRANGE lab focuses on using secondary data to better understand the stability and change in peer victimization experiences across childhood and adolescence in relation to both risk and protective factors.
Sînziana obtained a Pharmacist degree from ‘Carol Davila’ University in Romania and a Master of Science in Public Health Epidemiology from Karolinska Institute in Sweden. She was awarded a PhD in Public Health Epidemiology from the University of Bordeaux in France in 2020. Previously she worked as a trainee for the European Commission and the European Society for Prevention Research on projects related to the prevention of substance use at European level. Sînziana has a strong interest in child and adolescent social relationships and their impact on mental health, developmental psychology, life course epidemiology, causal inference, intervention research, and the uptake of scientific evidence into policy-making. E-mail: sinziana-ioana.oncioiu[at]magd.ox.ac.uk Researchgate.net |
Carolina Guzman Holst
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Carolina Guzman Holst is a DPhil student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Her doctoral work focuses on building a contemporary model of risk and resilience for adolescent peer victimisation using longitudinal analysis and experimental design. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how social, emotional and cognitive mechanisms interact with key biological systems to predict functioning in adolescents with a history of childhood bullying. To this end, she is using virtual reality to identify specific risk and protective pathways between bullying and psychological outcomes such as depression and anxiety. Her goal is to establish mechanisms that can be used to promote resilient outcomes across the life course and inform interventions for vulnerable adolescents.
Carolina graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Brown University and a Master of Science in Psychological Research from Oxford University. Her current DPhil work forms part of the “Changing Lives” project funded by the Calleva Foundation, which seeks to understand the life-long impact of early-life adversity and identify risk and protective factors that contribute to resilience across the life-course. Email: carolina.guzmanholst@magd.ox.ac.uk |
Mirela Zaneva
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Mirela Zaneva is a DPhil student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Her doctoral work focuses on applying advanced statistical methods from a range of disciplines, such as social epidemiology, behavioral genetics, and economics in order to investigate the impact of socioeconomic inequalities and material deprivation on health in young people. She is passionate about open science, data visualization, and new quantitative methods. Mirela graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a Research Master’s in Psychology from the University of Amsterdam. She enjoys interdisciplinary work and has research experience in neurocriminology, computational linguistics, behavioral ecology, public health and financial consulting. She is always open to collaborations – get in touch! Email: mirela.zaneva@psy.ox.ac.uk |
Athena Chow
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Athena Chow is a DPhil student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. Her doctoral work focuses on using data from longitudinal birth cohort studies to conceptualise adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) under the dimensions of threat and deprivation. Specifically, she is investigating how neurobiological mechanisms and protective factors interact to influence the impact of ACEs on risk for psychopathology, with a particular focus on children’s emotion regulation and executive function as the underlying mechanisms. Her current DPhil work forms part of the “Moving Beyond Inequality” programme funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which aims to reduce social inequalities by addressing the biological embedding of social adversity during the early years. Athena graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from University College London (UCL) and then continued researching the early risk factors for joint trajectories of bullying victimisation and perpetration in the UCL C-MAP Lab. Her interests include developmental psychopathology, longitudinal research methods, and life course epidemiology. Email: athena.chow@magd.ox.ac.uk |
Elise Sellars
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Elise is an MSc student in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, funded by the 1+3 ESRC Grand Union Doctoral Training Programme. Elise’s work in the oRANGE lab focuses on using longitudinal cohort data to explore the relationship between childhood sibling bullying victimisation and later mental health and wellbeing. Specifically, she is investigating the risk and promotive factors associated with better or worse mental health and wellbeing following sibling victimisation.
Elise graduated with a BA Hons in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford in 2018. Before joining the oRANGE lab in 2021, Elise worked as research assistant on several different projects in the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at the University of Oxford. Email: elise.sellars@magd.ox.ac.uk |
Marwa El-Gaby
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Marwa El-Gaby has previously been an educator in UK schools and other educational settings with experiences for over eight years. Prior to the MA Education degree at the University of Birmingham, she qualified as a secondary school mathematics teacher, and worked in the West Midlands of England for several years. Marwa has a BSc and MSc in Economics from the universities of Cardiff and Nottingham, respectively.
As part of the Oxford Risk and Resilience, Genes & Environment (oRANGE) lab, Marwa's current role involves assisting with the research to evaluate the effectiveness of the KiVa programme which aims to reduce bullying in primary schools across the UK. Email: marwa.el-gaby@psy.ox.ac.uk |
Dr. Chloe Bracegirdle
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Dr Chloe Bracegirdle is a Research Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her main research interests include intergroup contact, integration, prejudice, discrimination and social influence. She uses large-scale longitudinal social network and survey studies to investigate the impacts of contact between different ethnic and religious groups. Her current research examines how school social networks shape prejudice, discrimination and mental wellbeing among adolescents. Chloe received her DPhil in Psychology from the University of Oxford in 2020. She was awarded a MSc in Psychological Research from the University of Oxford in 2016 and a BSc Hons in Psychology and Language Sciences from University College London (UCL) in 2015. Chloe is now a Postdoctoral Researcher on the IntegrateYouth Project, funded by Nordforsk, and a Research Fellow at Nuffield College. Email: chloe.bracegirdle@nuffield.ox.ac.uk |
Dr. Mary Kempnich
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Dr Mary Kempnich is interested in how a period of transition affects our relationships and mental health. The importance of maintaining supporting relationships for our health, well-being, and performance can hardly be overstated. Social support is especially needed during potentially stressful times of change. Yet, the relationships offering such support might themselves appear especially fragile during such periods, and contribute to experiences of heightened levels of anxiety, depression, or loneliness – the pandemic serves as an excellent example.
Using prospective, longitudinal designs and combining personal and cohort social network analyses, her work aims to provide a better understanding of what factors predict how such a transition is experienced by whom. Her research integrates theories from social, evolutionary, and clinical psychology to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how changes in our (social) world affect us. She has moreover become interested in better understanding how mindfulness can combat and prevent such heightened levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness, and how a regular practice can also further the lives of those already doing well and choosing to connect with themselves in a curious, non-judgemental, and compassionate manner. Ultimately, she hopes to contribute to a shift in how we approach demanding periods of change, so that we can better navigate the challenges such times bring, and experience these as enriching and even enjoyable endeavours. In addition, she has developed a deep appreciation for how our relationship to others, to our work and our skills, and, perhaps most importantly, to ourselves largely shapes how healthy, happy, and long a life we lead. This appreciation prompted her to expand her research interests to also include mindfulness, to become a mindset mentor for high achievers, and to always teach, coach, and lead with the aim of positively impacting both a person's academic or professional skill sets as well as their personal development and well-being. If we are committing to continuously excelling across a lifetime – why not make it a worthwhile and even blissful experience? |