People

Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore PhD FBA FMedsci

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. She holds Honorary Professorships at UCL, London, UK and at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is leader of the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Group. Her group's research focuses on the development of social cognition and decision making in the human adolescent brain, and adolescent mental health. Her group runs behavioural studies in schools and in the lab, as well as neuroimaging studies, with adolescents and young adults. 

Professor Blakemore studied Experimental Psychology at Oxford University (1993-1996) and did a PhD (1996-2000) at the UCL Functional Imaging Lab with Professors Chris Frith and Daniel Wolpert, investigating the self processing in schizophrenia. She took up a Wellcome Trust International Research Fellowship (2001-2003) to work in Lyon, France, on social cognition in schizophrenia. This was followed by a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (2004-2007) and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2007-2016) at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. She was a Group Leader at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience until 2019, when she took up a Chair in Psychology at Cambridge.

Professor Blakemore's publications can be found on Google Scholar. 

Professor Blakemore co-authored a book with Professor Uta Frith called The Learning Brain: Lessons for Education. She was a member of the Royal Society BrainWaves working group for neuroscience, education and lifelong learning, the Royal Society Vision Committee for Science and Mathematics Education, the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee and the Times Education Commission. She was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific. Other public engagement activities include a play, Brainstorm, written and performed by teenagers and shown at the National Theatre in London, and a TED talk at TEDGlobal 2012. Her first solo book, Inventing Ourselves: the secret life of the teenage brain, was published in 2018 and was awarded the Royal Society Book Prize 2018, the British Psychological Society Book Prize 2020 and the Hay Festival Book of the Year 2018. 

Professor Blakemore chaired the Royal Society of Biology Education and Science Policy Committee. She sits on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Singapore National Research Foundation and the Singapore Ministry for Education. Professor Blakemore is an editor at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and on the advisory board of the Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. She was Founding Editor-in-Chief of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 

Professor Blakemore has been awarded national and international prizes for her research, including the British Psychological Society Doctoral Award 2001, the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal for outstanding early career research 2006, the Swedish Neuropsychology Society Award 2011, the Young Mind & Brain Prize 2013, the Royal Society Rosalind Franklin Award 2013, the Klaus J. Jacobs Prize 2015, the British Psychological Society Presidents' Award 2018 and the International Union of Psychological Science Quadrennial Major Advancement in Psychological Science Prize 2020. She is an Honorary Fellow of St John's College Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy, the American Association of Psychological Science and the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Email: sjblakemore@psychol.cam.ac.uk

Twitter: @sjblakemore

Dr Giacomo Bignardi

Giacomo is broadly interested in child & adolescent development, individual differences, and data science. Giacomo completed his PhD in the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (University of Cambridge), supervised by Dr Duncan Astle & Dr Edwin Dalmaijer. His PhD research explored how specific aspects of the environment, such as early adverse experiences, might impact different aspects of development. Giacomo joined the Blakemore lab to investigate developmental changes in mental health using data collected from the MYRIAD project.

Email: gb424@cam.ac.uk 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BignardiG

Web: www.bignardi.co.uk

Dr Sara De Felice

Sara is interested in the mechanisms that support learning in social interaction, especially when learning from and with others. She has completed her PhD at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN) at UCL, under the supervision of Professor Antonia Hamilton, where she used fNIRS hyperscanning to study brain synchrony between teacher and learner as a possible neural marker of learning. Sara is particularly interested in conducting real-world neuroscience and using multimodal paradigms (neuro-imaging in conjunction with behaviour). Sara joined Blakemore’s lab to extend her work to adolescence, a sensitive period for brain development of the social cognition network and a time when forming social relationships is particularly important.

The innovation and quality of her research has been recognised by a number of awards, including the BPS prize for psychology dissertation, the UCL Frackowiak Award, the fNIRS society Woman Excellence Award and the UCL Jon Driver Prize for outstanding PhD work in neuroscience.

Sara’s publication record can be found here.

Email: sd2035@cam.ac.uk

Dr Susanne Schweizer

Dr Susanne Schweizer is a Sir Henry Wellcome fellow investigating the development of affect regulatory processes in adolescence. She is particularly interested in exploring the role they play in the onset and maintenance of mental health problems across the lifespan. Before joining the Blakemore Lab, Dr Schweizer earned an MSc from the University of Maastricht, spent time at the late Professor Nolen-Hoeksema Depression and Cognition Program at Yale University and then was awarded a Gates Scholarship to complete her PhD at the University of Cambridge. After her PhD she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, where she was a member of Dr Tim Dalgleish's Cognition, Emotion and Mental Health Programme.

Email: s.schweizer@ucl.ac.uk

Emily Towner

Emily is a PhD Student and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. Her research focuses on learning during adolescence and the relationship between early stress, learning, and mental health. Before beginning her PhD, Emily was a lab manager and research associate in the Brain and Body Lab in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2019, she graduated from UCLA with a Master’s Degree in Social Science, where she completed a research project examining the interaction between early and current life stress on adolescent mental health and well-being. Emily also completed a postbaccalaureate program in psychology at Columbia University in 2018 where she studied memory and cognition.

Email: et467@cam.ac.uk

Sophie Fielmann

Sophie is a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, interested in cross-cultural cognitive development during adolescence. Her research focuses on how social cognitive abilities such as perspective-taking, susceptibility to peer influence, and emotion recognition develop in adolescents across cultures, particularly those in non-Western countries. In taking up this inclusive approach, her aim is to further our understanding of adolescence from a global perspective. Before joining Prof Blakemore’s group, Sophie completed a BSc in Psychology (Medical School Hamburg, Germany), an MPhil in Management (Cambridge Judge Business School), and an MSc in Cognitive Neurosciences (UCL).

Email: slf56@cam.ac.uk

Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer

Blanca is currently a third year PhD student in Psychology and a Gates Cambridge Scholar under the MRC Doctoral Training Programme. In a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the University of the Basque Country, Blanca's interdisciplinary research aims to understand the role of peer and friendship groups, family support and neighbourhood cohesion in mental health during adolescence. Blanca has a background in psychology and social sciences (Psychology Major in BSc Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics, University of Amsterdam, 2018) and in cognitive neuroscience (MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 2019). In 2019 and until the start of her PhD, Blanca was working for the Blakemore lab as a research assistant.

Email: bp451@cam.ac.uk

Kirsten Thomas

Kirsten is a first-year PhD student working across the Department of Psychology and the MRC Epidemiology Unit. She is broadly interested in understanding the social and cognitive factors around diet choices and eating behaviours in adolescents. Before beginning her PhD, she was working within the Blakemore lab as a research assistant, investigating the impact of social isolation in adolescents, particularly focused on peer influences. Kirsten's background is in Psychology (BSc Psychology, University of Sheffield) and Cognitive Neuroscience (MRes Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL). She is funded by the ESRC and the Gonville Research Studentship. 

Email: kt502@cam.ac.uk

Alex Griffin

Alex is a research assistant helping with various projects around the lab as well as taking care of administrative tasks. They are currently assisting with two projects looking at adolescent cognition, headed by Dr Anne-Lise Goddings and Blanca Piera Pi-Sunyer. They hold a BSc in Psychology from the University of Warwick and an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL. Alex has also spent time studying at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. 

Email: aeg66@cam.ac.uk

Twitter and Bluesky: @aegriffcogneuro(.bsky.social)

Mastodon: @aegriffcogneuro@mastodon.world

Stan de Visser

Stan is a visiting MSc student from the Netherlands working at the Blakemore lab as an intern. He is assisting Dr. Sara de Felice on a project focusing on peer effects in learning for adolescents and older individuals. Additionally, he is analyzing previously gathered data by Dr. de Felice, exploring the relationship between interactivity and learning. Stan earned his Bachelor's degree in liberal arts and sciences from University College Maastricht. 

Email: sd2065@cam.ac.uk

Dr Emma Kilford

Dr Emma Kilford carried out her PhD at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience under the supervision of Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Dr Vaughan Bell. Her PhD research examined the development of cognitive control and its integration with social cognitive and motivational-affective processing during adolescence, using a combination of genetic, cognitive and computational research techniques. After her PhD, Dr Kilford worked as a postdoctoral research associate on the project '”Developing a scalable treatment for depression in rural South Africa', funded by a GCRF Global Impact Acceleration Award, a project she remains actively involved in. Dr Kilford is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCL Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology working on a translational research project titled “Treating depression with self-compassion in virtual reality”, funded by a NIHR i4i Mental Health Challenge Award.

Email: e.kilford@ucl.ac.uk

Twitter: @ejkilford

Professor Larysa Zasiekina

Professor Larysa Zasiekina is a clinical psychologist and a leading expert in the areas of PTSD and cultural aspects of memory of trauma. Her focus is on the psychological inter-generational impact of genocide in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including studies of survivors of the Holocaust and Holodomor (man-made famine in Soviet Union targeting ethnic Ukrainians) and their children. Larysa Zasiekina has published extensively on language of trauma in high-impact journals in her field and spearheads international partnerships with scholars of genocide in universities of Canada, Israel, US, Switzerland, and the UK. Zasiekina’s clinical perspective and experience in clinical psycholinguistics are central to the current project “Exposure to Continuous Traumatic Stress (CTS) and Its Consequences among at Risk Adolescents and Young Adults in Ukraine”.

Email: lz464@cam.ac.uk