Speaker
Jennifer Lau
Professor of Youth Resilience and Co-Centre Lead of Psychiatry and Mental Health; Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London
Biography
Jennifer Lau is a research psychologist and principal investigator on a number of funded projects that explore the mechanisms of and interventions for child and adolescent anxiety, depression and loneliness. She is especially interested social health: the role of social determinants in influencing mental health outcomes and the role that social connections play in building resilience, well-being and good health in young people.
She graduated with an undergraduate degree in Psychology from UCL, before deciding to pursue a PhD at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s College London. Her doctoral thesis investigated gene-environment correlations and interactions in child and adolescent depression. After a brief visiting post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health in the US, she was appointed lecturer in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. In 2013, she moved back to King’s College London in the Psychology Department, before joining to co-direct the Youth Resilience Unit at Queen Mary, University of London.