Principal Investigators

Current Research

Two main areas of research interest include: first, investigating the relationship between particular genetic syndromes and associated psychiatric and behavioural disorders (e.g. Prader-Willi Syndrome and over-eating, and Down’s Syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease) and, secondly, clinico-legal studies, including studies investigating the capacity of people with learning disabilities to make particular decisions.

• Grants/Prizes    Appointed to the Health Foundation, Chair in Learning Disabilities as from September 2002, following a grant of £3 million over fifteen years for learning disability research.
•  Fellow and a Vice President of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disability (IASSID).
• Teaching:   Postgraduate and undergraduate teaching to medical students and to psychiatrists in training.

• Editor of the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research

• President UK Prader-Willi Association.

•  President Cambridge MENCAP.

Research interests  

My research interests reflect my academic background in psychology and criminology and my professional and personal experiences as a clinical and forensic psychologist with adults with learning and other developmental disabilities. My research lies mainly at the intersection of clinical and legal studies. Recent studies focus on:

• The conceptualisation and implementation of different aspects of the Mental Capacity Act 2005;

• People with learning disabilities and other developmental disabilities (particularly autistic spectrum conditions) as suspects, perpetrators, witnesses, and victims of exploitation, abuse, criminal offending, and ‘challenging behaviour’, and the development of community-based services that meet their needs;

• 'Moral' and other everyday decision-making by people with developmental disabilities;

• The mental health needs of people with dual sensory impairments.  

Like other members of the LD Research Group, I am committed to an inter-disciplinary approach and to research that informs policy and practice and contributes to the well-being of men and women with learning disabilities.  I am a Trustee of Respond (a charitable organisation providing psychotherapy to men and women with learning disabilities affected by trauma and abuse).

Current Research

In my research I model the genetic and epigenetic contribution to behaviour and mental disease. I have a particular focus on the role played by imprinted genes in brain functioning and as part of the LDRG I am dissecting the molecular contribution to neuropsychiatric illness seen in PWS.

Current studies in this programme of work are aimed at examining how the imprinted snoRNA mbii-52 in modifies serotonin receptor 2C functioning, and what consequences this has for the serotonin system and serotonergic related behaviours. It is hoped this work may lead to the identification of more specific pharmacological treatments for the mood disorder and obsessive/compulsive aspects of the PWS phenotype. Additionally, we are attempting to model the role played by Ube3a in the development of psychosis in the maternal-uniparental disomy and imprinting centre mutation genetic sub-types of PWS.

Current Funding

Beebe Trust Research Fellowship (2003-2008)

Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Studentship with GSK (2005-2008)

I hold a new and exciting post: building a research link between psychiatrically and psychologically trained colleagues in the Developmental Psychiatry Section and would-be colleagues across the social sciences. Links of this sort are currently being established through video research into self-advocacy and a PhD project, an institutional ethnography, looking at the care of people with PWS. Projects in the pipeline include a study of political participation amongst people with an intellectual disability and, an other video project, focused on assisted eating and drinking amongst people with profound and multiple disabilities. In addition to these empirical projects a social theory of intellectual disability is being developed.

Grants
Face-to-Face Communication in the Self-advocacy Movement: an exploratory case study. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Current Research

My long research and clinical interests are in the neuropsychiatric aspects of developmental and acquired brain damage and epilepsy.  Current research projects are focused on epilepsy and on autistic spectrum disorders.  In the field of epilepsy, I am investigating the nature of epilepsy as it presents to locality-based psychiatric learning disability services and investigating the effects of different treatment approaches.  I am also researching the relationship between psychopathological disturbances in people with epilepsy and brain pathology assessed along several axis.  In people with autism I am using electrophysiological and functional imaging approaches to investigate language and the way in which differences in semantic processes can be manipulated by external factors.  I am also involved in research using physical and neurocognitive methods to examine manifestations of weak central coherence in people with autism.

A clinical electrophysiological study of emotional lability in patients with systemic lupus erythematosis (sle) manuscript  figures  

Current Research

Various aspects of Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), especially cognition and behaviour and how this relates to the genetic abnormalities.  Current projects concerns psychiatric illness in PWS (with Sarita Soni and Tony Holland), IQ, emotion, recognition, childrens play interests and some aspects of executive function. A further project concerns the transition from the early phenotype of PWS (0-2 years approx.) and the later phenotype.

I am a consultant psychiatrist and a neuroscientist who has published in the following areas: the molecular pharmacology of GABAA receptors, neurosteroids, hippocampal synaptic plasticity (long-term potentiation), familial Alzheimer’s disease (presenilin) and female autism. I am interested in understanding the neuronal mechanisms that underlie deficits in learning and memory in people with intellectual disabilities and exploring ways of ameliorating or treating these. I am currently involved in research in dementia in Down’s syndrome. There are plans to explore the role of sleep in memory and learning in this population.