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Dr. Claire Gillan

Associate Professor (Psychology)

 gillancl@tcd.ie

 3531896

Associate Professor (Trinity Inst. of Neurosciences (TCIN))


Biography

Claire gained her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2013 under the supervision of Trevor Robbins. She stayed in Cambridge to complete a short postdoc funded by the Medical Research Council, before being awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at New York University. At NYU, Claire worked on computational approaches to understanding psychiatry with Nathaniel Daw and Liz Phelps. In 2015, Claire received the Junior Investigator Award from British Association for Psychophamacology for her work on goal-directed learning in obsessive-compulsive disorder. She serves on the editorial board for Brain and Neurosciences Advances, the new flagship journal of the British Neuroscience Association. Claire's lab at Trinity College Dublin is interested in developing novel approaches to studying brain health in psychiatric and ageing populations - a key goal is to develop objective tests that can be used to predict who will respond to which treatment. To undertake this work, since joining Trinity, Claire has been awarded a fellowship from MQ: transforming mental health to study machine learning predictors of treatment response. In addition, she has received funding from the Global Brain Health Institute and Science Foundation Ireland to develop a smartphone app 'Neureka' that engages the public in science on a large-scale.

Research Tags

  computational psychiatry   MACHINE LEARNING

Research Projects

 The DETECT project Developing a global infrastructure for digital brain health research at GBHI
 A computational approach to identifying trans-diagnostic predictors of antidepressant response
 A neurocomputational investigation of Pavlovian-instrumental interactions in avoidance

Representations

Details Date
Journal Peer Review for >30 Journals including PNAS, American Journal of Psychiatry, Nature Human Behaviour, Current Biology, Biological Psychiatry, Science Advances, Nature Communications 2011
Editorial Board at eLife 2020-present
PhD Thesis Examination University of Copenhagen 2022
PhD Thesis Examination, Ecole Normale Superiore 2021
PhD Thesis Examination KU Leuven 2022
PhD Thesis Examination University College London 2023
PhD Thesis Examination Oxford University 2023
Editorial Board: Brain and Neuroscience Advances (journal) 2018-present
Grant review panel for Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) German Research Foundation 2023
Editorial Board: Computational Psychiatry 2021-present
Advisory Panel for Alzheimer's Research UK: Think Brain Health Campaign 2021-present
NIH roundtable on computational psychiatry, Panellist 2022
Interview Panel for Wellcome Trust Mental Health Award: Looking Backwards, Moving Forwards 2022
Scientific Advisory Board for Plato Science 2022-present
Scientific Advisory Board for the Wellcome Trust Mental Health Priority Area 2020-present
Scientific Advisory Board: It Get's Brighter (UK mental health charity) 2017-present
NIMH Computational Psychiatry Working Group. NIMH, Bethesda, USA. 2017
International computational psychiatry consensus statement working group. Banbury Meeting, Cold Spring Harbour, USA. 2019
Grant Review: National Institute of Mental Health (NIIMH), R21 scheme 2020
Grant Review: Medical Research Council (MRC), UK 2018
Grant Review: European Research Council (ERC), Consolidator scheme 2019
Grant Review: Marie Curie 2016
Grant Review: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 2019
Masters thesis supervisor for ENS Paris MA programme 2019-2020

Languages

Language Skill Reading Skill Writing Skill Speaking
English Fluent Fluent Fluent

Memberships

Membership of Professional Institutions, Associations, Societies

Details Date From Date To
Society for Neuroeconomics Present 2020
Neuroscience Ireland 2021 Present
British Association for Psychopharmacology Present 2013
Society of Biological Psychiatry Present 2015
Habit Formation in, editor(s)Lynall & Jones , Cambridge Textbook of Neuroscience for Psychiatrists, Cambridge, UK, 2023, [Gillan CM], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED
Fox CA, Lee CT, Hanlon A, Seow TXF, Lynch K, Harty S, Richards D, Palacios J, O'Keane V, Stephan KE, Gillan C, Metacognition in anxious-depression is state-dependent: an observational treatment study, 2023, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Robert Whelan, Florentine M. Barbey, Marcia R. Cominetti, Claire M. Gillan, Anna M. Rosická, Developments in scalable strategies for detecting early markers of cognitive decline, Translational Psychiatry, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Alexandra Kathryn Hopkins, Claire Gillan, Jonathan Paul Roiser, Toby Wise, Nura Sidarus, Optimising the measurement of anxious-depressive, compulsivity and intrusive thought and social withdrawal transdiagnostic symptom dimensions, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Vanessa M. Brown, Claire M. Gillan, Marlee Renard, Rachel Kaskie, Michelle Degutis, Anna Wears, Greg J. Siegle, Fabio Ferrarelli, Susanne E. Ahmari, Rebecca B. Price, A double-blind study assessing the impact of orbitofrontal theta burst stimulation on goal-directed behavior., Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Legaz A, Abrevaya S, Dottori M, González Campo C, Birba A, Martorell Caro M, Aguirre J, Slachevsky A, Aranguiz R, Serrano C, Gillan CM, Leroi I, Ibañez A, Multimodal mechanisms of human socially reinforced learning across neurodegenerative diseases., Brain : a journal of neurology, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Sean W. Kelley, Caoimhe Ní Mhaonaigh, Louise Burke, Robert Whelan, Claire M. Gillan, Machine learning of language use on Twitter reveals weak and non-specific predictions, npj Digital Medicine, 5, (1), 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Kelly R. Donegan, Claire M. Gillan, New principles and new paths needed for online research in mental health: Commentary on Burnette et al. (2021), International Journal of Eating Disorders, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Sean W. Kelley, Claire M. Gillan, Using language in social media posts to study the network dynamics of depression longitudinally, Nature Communications, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
Price, R.B., Ferrarelli, F., Hanlon, C., Gillan, C.M., Kim, T., Siegle, G.J., Wallace, M.L., Renard, M., Kaskie, R., Degutis, M., Wears, A., Brown, V., Rengasamy, M., Ahmari, S.E., Resting-State Functional Connectivity Differences Following Experimental Manipulation of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in Two Directions via Theta-Burst Stimulation, Clinical Psychological Science, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED  DOI
  

Page 1 of 7
Sean Kelley, Aaron Jason Fisher, Chi Tak Lee, Eoghan Gallagher, Anna K Hanlon, Ian Robertson, Claire Gillan, Elevated Emotion Network Connectivity Leaves People Vulnerable to Fluctuations in Depression, biorxiv, 2022, Journal Article, PUBLISHED

  

Awards and Honours

Award Date
Early Career Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics 2022
Ziskind-Somerfeld Research Award for Outstanding Research Investigations in Biological Psychiatry, Honorable Mention 2015
Junior Investigator Award, British Association for Psychopharmacology 2015
Postdoc Travel Award, British Association for Psychopharmacology 2015
UK Science & Innovation Network Travel Grant 2014
InSRI Annual Meeting Poster Award 2014
Guarantors of Brain Travel Award 2013
Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship 2013
Isaac Newton Trust Public Engagement Grant 2013
Medical Research Council Centenary Postdoctoral Fellowship 2012
Oon Khye Beng Chʹhia Tsio Studentship Award 2011
Downing College Academic Travel Award 2011
Oon Khye Beng Chʹhia Tsio Studentship Award 2010
Medical Research Council PhD Studentship 2009
Cambridge European Trust Studentship (declined) 2009
Hodson Endowment Award 2006
University College Dublin, Entrance Scholarship 2006
Top 30 Thinkers Under 30 (Pacific Standard) 2014

Research Interests

Description Of Research Interests

The goal of my research is to understand the fundamental brain processes that leave people vulnerable to mental health problems. A core aspect of my research concerns understanding of how habits are formed and overcome using a combination of electroencephalography and computational modelling, which is the topic of my 2020 ERC starting grant. This foundational work links to theories that I have developed on the role of the brain"s habit system in disorders of compulsion. This theory is now so widely recognised that it features in our undergraduate psychology textbooks. I have developed several new methods for scaling up research in an emerging field of computational psychiatry. For example, I developed `computational factor modelling", a novel method to validate dimensions of mental health problems in large unselected samples. This technique has since been used in >20 papers by international groups and is the topic of numerous collaborations (including KCL, Princeton and UCL). I am a leader in smartphone science, having built the Neureka App that engages over 18,000 registered users as citizen scientists and is now being used by 5 external research teams (UCL, University of Minnesota, Oxford, Chile and Mt Sinai). I have pioneered novel methods for studying how mood states evolve and interact dynamically over time using natural language processing of social media data and have developed a new method to conduct large scale precision CBT studies. I have won several major awards for my research contributions, including Science Foundation Ireland"s Early Career Researcher of the Year (2022) and the Early Career Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics (2022). I have gained >3 million in funding for my research. I review, interview and consult for major funding panels (e.g. ERC, Wellcome, NIMH) a have been invited to give 4 plenaries at international conferences in the past year alone.