A Student’s Insight Into The Gatt Resilience Lab

By Emily Crocetti and Miranda Chilver

 

Recently the Gatt Resilience Lab grew by two members, visiting research assistant Emily Crocetti from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Miranda Chilver new PhD student. Both join Dr Justine Gatt in her quest to not only understand what makes people more resilient to mental illness and disorder but also how to develop methods and tools to train others to increase their resilience.

 

Emily

Hi all, as has been said I am visiting from the states, and for those that don’t know where New Hampshire is, it is just south-west of Maine. And I have travelled all the way to NeuRA to join the Gatt lab as I have a passion to understand what it is that makes some of us resilient, I think it is a research field that could help so many, especially in the clinical world.

My first tasks in the lab will be to develop a literature review on diffusion-tensor-imaging (DIT), and the relationship white matter tracts have, if any, to resilience and wellbeing. Specifically, if there is any relationship to these measures and some disorders common in low resilience and high stress such as anxiety.

Further to this, I will be helping refine the definition of resilience as it is only a very recent research idea and topic.

I am excited to see this work get real-world applications and eventually I can hope, see it developed to the point where everyone will have the tools to make themselves more resilient.

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Miranda

So I am a graduate of a BPysch with Honours from the University of New South Wales. During my Honours year, I worked on EEG and its relationships to sensation and sensory suppression.

For my PhD, I will be working on continuing the Twin-E study started by Dr Gatt, but now looking at their EEG data and finding statistical correlates not only to any wellbeing, and resilience scales but also their MRI and volume analysis. Essentially, trying to find the EEG markers for resilience. I want to find out why some people are more resilient than others.

I hope that by the end of my PhD, I can see the implementation of newly developed interventions to the general population, and we would start this by employing the COMPAS-W scale to at least determine how resilient you are.

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