Calum Guinea - 2021 cohort

Calum Guinea cg771@cam.ac.uk

UK

Psychology, St Catharine's College

PhD thesis: Habenular Orchestration of Learning and Motivation across Depression and Anxiety

Research interests:
1. Computational psychiatry
2. Transdiagnostic approaches to mental health
3. Mental health ‘biomarkers’
4. Memory and decision making

My PhD focuses on how the habenula, a tiny and highly evolutionarily conserved brain structure contributes to our learning and motivation for reward and punishment, paricularly as it relates to specific symptoms of anxiety and depression. The aim of my PhD will be to disentangle the behavioural effects of anxiety and depression on learning and motivation, characterise their interaction during decision making and probe how the habenula contributes to these processes using 7T fMRI. A mechanistic understanding of how anxiety and depression symptoms affect learning and motivation will help inform treatment development, particularly for instances of comorbidity and describing the habenula’s role in these processes will help build a neural model of these symptoms.

Who or what inspired you to pursue your research interests?

The brain is perhaps the most complex thing we know to exist, the challenge of unlocking some of its mysteries is an exciting one. My interest in mental health comes from experience working with patients and the relative stagnation in treatment development for psychiatric conditions. In order to improve outcomes for people with a mental health diagnosis we need to develop a mechanistic understanding of symptoms and think beyond traditional diagnostic categories. My research aims to contribute to this understanding by providing a mechanistic description of cardinal anxiety and depression symptoms.