Project

Now Dr. Ellie Smith, Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar
(former Post-doc Cambridge University, now Consultancy)

My PhD research explored the influence parental schizotypy has on infant and childhood risk for mental health disorders utilising electroencephalography and event-related component analyses. My thesis explored how early and late (i.e. high and low-level) cortical markers of risk for schizophrenia in schizotypal mothers were not overtly present in their 6-month-old offspring on a group level but were present through correlational analyses; suggesting that proneness to schizotypal traits must develop later in childhood.

In my Post-Doctoral research at the University of Cambridge, I aimed to explore the behavioural and neurophysiological mechanisms of expectation learning in infancy, using a sophisticated model-based computational approach. I was interested in observing how infants learn to associate sounds and images and how they adapted their learning strategies in volatile environments.

Now having shifted my career into Research Consultancy, I am still research active; exploring my primary research interests of infant learning but also oculomotor deficits between diagnoses (predominantly psychoses) and transdiagnostically across diagnostic groups.