The South Wales and South-West England Brain and Genomics Hub of the UKRI-funded National Mental Health Platform aims to inform novel approaches for improving stratification and classification in psychiatric disorders. It will employ deep phenotyping strategies, including advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG), clinical, cognitive, genetic, epigenomic, and immunometabolic evaluations, in 600 people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder. 

This project, conducted at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), aims to establish how brain structure-function relationships are affected in people with psychosis, and how these alterations might lead to symptoms of psychosis, such as delusions, hallucinations, and cognitive deficits. The project aims to link data from multiple modalities, including MRI, MEG and behavioural tasks to build a better understanding of brain coupling in psychotic disorders. 

This project, conducted at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), aims to evaluate the microstructural properties of white matter in the human brain using state of the art neuroimaging techniques. Not only will this project teach us more about the structural features of white matter in the living brain, it will allow us to evaluate relationships between structure and function, linking data from multiple modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), magnetoencephalography (MEG) and behavioural tasks. 

Why do some people with schizophrenia respond well to treatment with antipsychotic medication while others remain symptomatic? This project, conducted at the University of Auckland, aimed to identify features of the brain that are associated with treatment resistance in people with schizophrenia. The project included two studies involving a range of treatment response sub-types and multiple advanced neuroimaging techniques, including structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, diffusion tensor imaging and electroencephalography. 

Projects include designing an open-source Python-based analysis protocol for analysing publicly available function magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, identification of artefacts in multi-band fMRI, statistical analysis of nested data and advanced machine learning techniques for combining structural and functional connectivity data from magnetic resonance imaging.

Some bacteria in our gut produce the same chemicals that our brains use every day. We want to know if these chemicals affect the structure and function of the brain and whether increasing the amount of "good" bacteria in the gut improves our ability to perform different tasks. This work is being conducted with researchers at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading. The project includes two studies using state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques to investigate the gut-brain axis in healthy male volunteers. As the largest study of its kind, its outcomes are expected to change how we understand the link between the gut and the brain function in humans, and could contribute to the understanding of complex disorders such as autism spectrum disorders and anxiety.

Are our brains similar to those of our friends and do our social relationships influence how our brains respond to rewarding experiences? This work was conducted with researchers at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading and BrainCanDo, Queen Anne's School. The project aimed to identify whether friends share similar brain function during rest and while engaging in a motivational task.

OSF page for this project: https://osf.io/ahpq5/ 

Are our moral principles fixed or are our decisions influenced by our current experiences? This project aims to determine whether people's moral principles change over time and when they experience moral dilemmas in virtual reality.  The effect of COVID-19 on people's moral decision-making and behaviour has also been investigated.

OSF pages related to this project: https://osf.io/xvbrf/ & https://osf.io/u5a3t/