Biography

 

Lena Dorfschmidt

Lena Dorfschmidt

  • Alumni
  • Germany
  • 2018 PhD Psychiatry
  • Darwin College

During my undergraduate studies in Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University in Germany I became interested in machine learning and graph theory. I joined professor Henrik Walter’s lab at Charité University in Berlin, Germany, and worked with Dr. Jonathan Clayden at the Developmental Imaging and Biophysics Unit at University College London, UK. I am fascinated by a graph-theoretical approach to the study of whole-brain network organization in health and disease. Psychiatric illnesses, like mood disorders, often impede with our ability to lead independent and self-determined lives. With my research, I aim to contribute to a better understanding of such illnesses in order to develop biomarkers that allow for the effective detection, prediction and discrimination of mood disorders. At Cambridge I will be doing a PhD in Psychiatry, studying trajectories of brain network development, adolescent depressive symptoms and mood disorder. I will combine multimodal MRI metrics of network organization with machine learning tools to identify network phenotypes that are most predictive of subclinical depressive symptoms and depressive disorder.

Previous Education

University of Osnabruck