معرفی
Dr Darya Gaysina is a Reader in Mental Health Science at the School of Psychology, University of Sussex. She holds a PhD in Human Genetics from the Russian Academy of Sciences and has conducted postdoctoral research at King’s College London (KCL) and University College London (UCL). Her research focuses on mental health across the life course, integrating methods from behavioral genetics, epidemiology, and data science to explore environmental, genetic, and developmental factors influencing mental health problems. Key areas include the interplay between mental and physical health, trajectories of affective symptoms, and interventions for perinatal mental health in global contexts like Malawi. She leads the EDGE Lab and has secured grants from the Academy of Medical Sciences and Mental Health Research UK. Her teaching includes modules on the Nature and Nurture of Mental Health and contributes to the MSc Big Data program. She supervises PhD students and accepts new applications.
Education: PhD in Human Genetics (Russian Academy of Sciences). Postdoctoral Fellowships: ERC INTAS-funded at KCL’s Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre; MRC-funded at UCL’s Lifelong Health and Ageing Unit. Academic Path: Lecturer at University of Leicester (2011–2013), moving to Sussex in 2013.
Research Interests: Life course mental health, gene-environment interactions, global mental health interventions, and cognitive aging. Recent work involves co-designing the FOR MAMA intervention for pregnant adolescents in Malawi and studying bidirectional links between wellbeing and memory function. Her publications span affective symptom trajectories, genetic influences on mental health, and cardiometabolic risk factors.
Grants & Funding: Includes £330K for Pan-African Mental Health Research Network initiatives (2024–2025), predicting mental disorder outcomes in older adults (2018–2022), and mental health research in Central Asia (2018–2020).
Labs & Teams: Principal Investigator of the EDGE Lab, focusing on interdisciplinary mental health research. Collaborates globally on projects addressing perinatal mental health and adolescent mental health in low-resource settings.
