Alex Pike, Lecturer in Mental Health at the Department of Psychology
Alex joined the University of York in 2022 having completed a DPhil in Psychiatry on eating disorders and compulsivity at the University of Oxford in 2018.
She has also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UCL in the Neuroscience and Mental Health Group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
email: alex.pike@york.ac.uk
Our 60 seconds interview with Alex:
What do you do in the field of mental health?
I work in the area of cognitive neuroscience, trying to understand how mental illness may affect the way we think, learn and make decisions.
What do you find most rewarding and inspiring in this work?
Meeting other people who care about mental health. Also, bouncing ideas off other people and having geeky conversations about methods!
What is the most challenging or complicated aspect of this work?
Trying to understand and navigate the different systems that you have to get through in order to run research!
What impact do you hope your work is having- or can potentially have?
I hope that understanding more about differences in our minds and brains will allow us to develop better treatments for mental health problems in the future.
Could you share with us one piece of advice that you follow for your own mental health?
When you find something hard, try to have a toolkit of different things to try to help you gain perspective.