Dr Martina di Simplicio is based at the Centre for Psychiatry, Brain Sciences Division at Imperial College London whilst working as a Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in the West London Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.
Dr Simplicio’s research takes an experimental medicine and cognitive phenotyping approach, to investigate the cognitive processes underlying emotional dysregulation and mood instability across mental disorders, with a main focus on young people and the development of innovative early interventions. Integrating psychiatry, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, she uses a variety of approaches, from behavioural experiments, to psychophysiology, and neuroimaging to investigate research areas.
A key part of her work is to evaluate and translate experimental findings into early stage clinical treatment studies, in particular developing brief and customisable interventions enabled by digital tools. One recent development is the IMAGINATOR App for episodic simulation-based self-harm reduction, which was built together with an advisory group of young people with lived experience of self-harm.
Dr Simplicio trained in Medicine and Psychiatry at the University of Siena, Italy. During her PhD, she studies at the Psychopharmacology and Emotion Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford, where she investigated how short-term antidepressant administration impacts negative emotional information processing biases in young people at risk for depression. During her stay at Oxford she also trained in cognitive behavioural therapy at the Oxford Cognitive Therapy Centre, specialising on mental imagery-based techniques. After Oxford, she was Career Development Fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, and Research Associate at Jesus College. Her research focused on the cognitive and neural-bases of mental imagery-focused emotion regulation treatment in bipolar disorder and self-harm. At Cambridge, she also worked as a Consultant Psychiatrist in the First Response Service of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust.
Dr Simplicio also engages in arts-science collaborations both in research (co-supervising students of the Royal College of Art, Animation programme) and to promote public communication of mental health science.