DR EMMA LAWRANCE

Emma Lawrance is the Mental Health Innovations Fellow at the Institute of Global Health Innovation. She leads the mental health strategy for the Institute, primarily encompassing research and innovation in digital mental health support, and the climate change and mental health program, Climate Cares. She is also a member of the Mental Health Innovations team, leading the partnership with Imperial researchers to study the Shout dataset and supervising students. Other work includes a focus on youth mental health, and improving the use of mental health data from charities to better understand mental health needs and the impact of services.

Emma’s background is in physics and chemistry (BSc (Hons), Flinders University), science communication (Grad Dip, Australian National University) and neuroscience (MSc, University of Oxford). A variety of previous roles include work across science communication and science education. For her DPhil in Clinical Neuroscience she used fMRI and computational modelling to examine how uncertainty is processed in the brain and affects decisions, particularly for those with a tendency to experience anxiety. She also examined the interactions between perceptual uncertainty and strategy uncertainty, and how our brain integrates this information to modulate attentional systems for goal-directed behaviour. Alongside this work she founded the youth mental health charity It Gets Brighter, of which she remains a Trustee.