Matilde Vaghi

Associate Professor in Psychology

MRC Career Development Award Fellow

Research Interests

Matilde’s lab at Birkbeck, University of London aims to uncover the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying psychiatric conditions, with a particular focus on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and more generally the dimension of compulsivity.

We seek to define how neural circuits give rise to cognitive and emotional processes, and how disruptions in these systems contribute to neuropsychiatric disorders. To achieve this, we integrate advanced neuroimaging techniques, and in particular precision neuroimaging, with pharmacological approaches, large-scale behavioural experiments, and computational modelling across both healthy individuals and clinical populations.

In the long-term, our work may help to explain how systems-level circuit dysfunction contributes to the pathogenesis of disorders on the compulsivity spectrum and other neuropsychiatric diseases across the lifespan. This, in turn, may translate into the development of new treatment modalities and tailored interventions.

Education

Matilde gained her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2017 under the supervision of Trevor Robbins and Ed Bullmore. Then, she was a postdoc at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging in London. Here. Matilde used publicly available datasets from the NeuroScience in Psychiatry Network and worked on the understanding of the developmental trajectory of cognitive processes and neural networks implicated in compulsivity with Ray Dolan. To create a tool apt for large-scale and longitudinal data collection and to engage the public in science, she also contributed to the development of a new smartphone app ‘The Happiness Project’ with Robb Rutledge. She was then awarded a Human Frontier Science

Program Fellowship and a Young Investigator NARSAD Award to continue her work at Stanford with Russ Poldrack.

Awards, Funding, Grants

· Medical Research Council, Career Development Award

· Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship

· Brain and Behavior Research Foundation: 2019 NARSAD Young Investigator Grant

· Society for Biological Psychiatry Travel Grant Award

Publications