DrMartina Di Simplicio

I lead the Mood Instability Research team in the Division of Psychiatry, Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London and I also work as a Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in the West London Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, where I am the Clinical Lead for the 16-25 Young Adult Partnership (YAP).

RESEARCH

My research takes an experimental medicine and cognitive phenotyping approach to investigate the processes that underlie emotional dysregulation and mood instability across mental disorders. I focus on young people vulnerable to mood instability with the aim of developing innovative early interventions.

A special interest of my work is how mental imagery-based cognition, such as episodic future simulation, may contribute to mood instability and self-harm behaviour in young people.

Integrating psychiatry, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, I use a variety of approaches, from behavioural experiments, to psychophysiology, and neuroimaging to investigate these research areas.

A key part of my work is to evaluate and translate experimental findings into early stage clinical treatment studies, in particular developing brief and engaging interventions that harness the potential of digital tools. I am also interested in exploiting digital tools for tracking health, phenotyping and discovering novel markers of disease and treatment response. For example, I have developed the IMAGINATOR App for episodic simulation-based self-harm reduction, which was co-designed with young people with lived experience of self-harm. You can hear more about the development of IMAGINATOR here, presented at the MindTech 2017 Symposium, and find the newest app here. Together with Aldo Faisal and Dasha Nicholls we built the MindCraft App to track active and passive metrics of mental health in adolescents in schools and young people under mental health services.

You can find more details about current research projects in MIR team page.

ACADEMIC CAREER

I trained in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Siena in Italy. During my PhD in the Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford I investigated how short-term antidepressant administration impact negative emotional information processing biases in young people at risk for depression. At Oxford, I also trained in cognitive behavioural therapy at the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre, specialising on mental imagery-based techniques.

After Oxford, I was a Career Development Fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, and Research Associate at Jesus College. My research focused on the cognitive and neural-bases of mental imagery-focused emotion regulation treatment in bipolar disorder and self-harm. At Cambridge, I also worked as a Consultant Psychiatrist in the First Response Service of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.