Amy Gillespie

I am working as a postdoctoral researcher with the Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Lab (PERL), led by Professor Catherine Harmer. I am broadly interested in research which helps us understand the mechanisms of psychiatric problems and their treatments. 

My main project investigates the effect of a 5-HT4 partial agonist on emotional and non-emotional cognitive processing in a) unmedicated patients with depression (RESTAND study) and b) patients with depression resistant to SSRI/SNRIs (RESTART study). I also co-ordinate day-to-day running of the COSIE study, a large longitudinal online study investigating risk and resilience factors during the pandemic via online assessments of emotional cognition.  

My PhD was also in psychopharmacology research, focused on a) the differences between participants with treatment-resistant and treatment-responsive schizophrenia and b) the effects of clozapine on DNA methylation (an epigenetic process) in treatment-resistant schizophrenia at King's College London. 

I enjoy working on improving and standardising cognitive tasks and reproducible analysis pipelines, supporting colleagues and collaborators in setting up their studies, supervising masters students, co-chairing the Patients Active in Research Strategy group, public engagement events and occasional bursts of tweeting.