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Research @ TransPEPP

Psychiatric disorders such as psychosis and depression are one of the largest contributors to human suffering across the globe. This large burden is attributed to two vicious aspects of many psychiatric disorders: (1) they start at a young age and (2) they are recurrent in nature. TransPEPP utilizes the state-of-art neuroimaging facilities at Robarts Research Institute and Lawson Imaging to enhance Early Intervention and address relapsing and recurring nature of mental disorders. The broader focus of TransPEPP is to put neuroscience to clinical use for the benefit of patients and clinicians fighting mental illnesses.

We are engaged in three major areas of research:

1. Developing tools to predict outcome after first-episode psychosis

2. Understanding the brain mechanism behind mental states such as depression, mania and hallucinations

3. Developing noninvasive treatment approaches to reduce the severity of psychiatric disorders

To this end, we use two related methods:

Systems Neuroscience – studying the emergent properties of brain being a system of various interconnected domains and investigating how the various subsystems interact in health and fail to interact in disease states; to this end, we use structural and functional MRI and computational approaches based on graph theory and causal modelling.

Interventional Neuroscience – studying the physiological and clinical effects of a ‘perturb’ and ‘observe’ approach applied to human brain; to achieve this, we use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), psychotherapeutic (e.g. cognitive training) and pharmacological approaches (e.g. oxytocin) that modulate brain networks.