Erin Lawrence
PhD Student
Erin is a PhD student based in the ASSET team at Queen Mary, University of London. Her PhD project focuses on understanding the psychosocial risk factors for physical multimorbidity among individuals with psychosis, using a mixed methods approach. Erin was awarded funding by the London Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (LISS DTP) from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in 2022 to complete this project.
Her previous studies include an MSc in Psychiatric Research (awarded Distinction) from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London and a First-Class Honours BSc in Psychology from the University of Southampton.
Erin’s previous research posts include being a Research Assistant at the Academic Department of Military Mental Health at the IoPPN, King’s College London, where she worked across multiple epidemiological research studies to understand the risk factors for mental health outcomes among serving military personnel. She has also worked in industry-based dementia prevention research and helped to develop and test the utility of a digital health application to predict the 10-year risk of dementia using machine learning, in collaboration with the University of Oxford.
Erin’s primary research interests lie in the field of psychosis, particularly in the identification of risk factors for health outcomes and disease progression. Specifically, her interests include the understanding of how psychosocial factors, like stress and adverse life events, can detrimentally impact health outcomes, such as the onset of psychotic symptoms or comorbid physical conditions, and how such psychosocial factors can be explained through syndemic frameworks. Alongside her PhD, Erin is also working on a study investigating the moderating effects of genetic and environmental risk factors on the association between bullying victimisation in late childhood and paranoia in adolescence- a symptom that is central to the prodromal phase of psychosis.