MissMaria Balaet

Dr. Maria Balaet was a member of the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London between 2017-2024, after which she became a Research Associate in the Department of Neuroimaging at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King's College London.

Maria's work is multidisciplinary and involves multivariate and machine learning methods to analyse cognitive, neuroimaging, fixed item and free text survey data to answer key questions about the human brain in health, disease and under the influence of either therapeutic or recreational drugs. Currently, she works with Professor Adam Hampshire on the cognitive biomarker stream of the m-TBI consortium led by Professor Alex Sinclair and funded by the UK and US ministry of defence, continues to lead the drug use study arm of the Great British Intelligence Test and is launching a new study investigating childbirth manifestations as an altered state. She maintains strong collaborative ties with Imperial College.

Work Maria carried out while at Imperial College:

During her PhD she was supervised by Professor Adam Hampshire and Professor Paresh Malhotra and focused on understanding how cognition differs from the normative population in a specific set of clinical groups, namely in Parkinson's Disease and REM sleep behavioural disorder. For this purpose she collaborated with Professor Michele Hu and her team at the University of Oxford on enrolling patients part of the Oxford Discovery Cohort onto the Cognitron platform where they participated in a comprehensive computerised cognitive assessments. The data collected during this project was then used to characterise specific cognitive deficits in the two clinical groups in detail and also to create a short and easy to deploy battery of cognitive tasks that can pick up these deficits in individual patients with high sensitivity. This battery, since published in npj Digital Medicine, is now used in a number of studies across the UK, as well as internationally.

While at Imperial College, Maria has also been a key member of the Great British Intelligence Test (GBIT) project led by Professor Adam Hampshire. During this project, a subset of ~140k (out of over 500k participants originally recruited) British individuals were monitored longitudinally at 6-monthly timepoints between December 2019-September 2023. GBIT gave her the opportunity to lead an arm of the study investigating recreational drug consumption in the general population and use super-scale comprehensive cognitive testing and established mental health assessments longitudinally to understand:
1) how COVID-19 impacted recreational drug consumption patterns in the UK
2) how these fluctuations have in turn impacted the cognitive performance, mental health and lifestyle of recreational drug users
3) what are the key fundamental differences in terms of mental health and cognitive performance between those who are drug users vs. those who never used drugs
4) are users of certain classes of drugs (e.g. psychedelics) more resilient or able to excel in certain cognitive domains compared to those who are users of other drugs or have never used drugs?

As part of the GBIT project she also developed natural language processing algorithms for understanding from participants' own words the underlying reasoning for being sceptical about the government and mainstream COVID-19 narrative during the pandemic and how their opinions related to their behaviour and compliance with containment guidelines.

Finally, Maria was also involved in teaching at Imperial College - as a tutor and project supervisor for the Translational Neuroscience MSc and Experimental Neuroscience MRes, is a mentor for In2Science UK and regularly carries out public outreach and engagement events to make scientific knowledge available to the wider general public. Notably, she was one of the scientists behind the scenes for the TV series Family Brain Games created based on the Cognitron Brain Testing Technology (https://www.cognitron.co.uk) and streamed on BBC2. She has also delivered over 50 public talks on the science behind commonly used recreational drugs (e.g. psychedelics) in the past year alone with an emphasis on drawing empirically based conclusions and practicing harm reduction, making her one of the key science communicators on this topic in the UK.

Her work at Imperial College was supported by a prestigious award from the Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Programme received in February 2019.