معرفی
Dr. Charlotte Gayer-Anderson is a Research Fellow at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), where she has been working since 2009. As a Peggy Pollak Research Fellow, she focuses on understanding the role of social environment and adversities as predictors for mental health problems, particularly psychosis in adolescents. Her research employs innovative Virtual Reality (VR) applications to study social and psychological risk factors for paranoia in young people.
Dr. Gayer-Anderson obtained her PhD from IoPPN in 2013, with research focusing on the combined role of childhood adversity and protective factors in the development of psychotic disorders. Her doctoral work established the foundation for her ongoing research into risk and resilience factors in adolescent mental health.
Her research interests span epidemiology and social influences on the aetiology of psychoses, adolescent mental health, virtual reality for mental health assessment, and the combined role of adverse life events and protective factors on mental health outcomes. Dr. Gayer-Anderson's work particularly emphasizes understanding why some young people develop mental health problems in the face of adversity while others demonstrate resilience. She has designed and implemented immersive VR applications to investigate social and psychological risk factors for paranoia in adolescents.
Dr. Gayer-Anderson's recent publications demonstrate a strong methodological and thematic coherence, with consistent focus on adolescent mental health epidemiology, psychosis risk factors, and innovative research methodologies. Her work spans large-scale epidemiological studies of risk and resilience factors across diverse populations, investigations into the impact of social environment on mental health trajectories, and exploration of novel digital assessment tools for mental health conditions. She is particularly known for her work on the REACH study, which investigates mental health in over 4000 adolescents in south London.
Dr. Gayer-Anderson has received recognition for her innovative work:
- Digital Economy Crucible 2019 membership (UK-wide multi-disciplinary leadership programme for Early Career Researchers)
- Selection for the 2017 Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition for her VR work on eMental Health, which attracted approximately 14,000 visitors and media coverage from Sky News and BBC
As an educator, Dr. Gayer-Anderson contributes significantly to teaching across IoPPN's MSc programs, with expertise in epidemiology (including case-control studies, bias, confounding & interactions), virtual reality applications in mental health assessment, and social psychiatry. She coordinates and teaches the annual Short Course in Epidemiology and Statistics in Mental Health Research, demonstrating her commitment to training the next generation of mental health researchers.
Dr. Gayer-Anderson is an active member of the Social Epidemiology Research Group and the Virtual Reality Lab at IoPPN. Her current research involves major cohort studies including REACH (Resilience, Ethnicity and AdolesCent Mental Health), EU-GEI (an international case-control and incidence study of patients with first episode psychosis in six European countries and Brazil), and the CAPsy study (a London-based first-episode case-control study investigating childhood adversity in psychotic disorders).
