Ongoing projects
Find out more about ongoing research in the TREND Lab
Attention & Emotion study
This study is a collaboration with colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), funded by the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. The goal of this study is to identify childhood clinical, psychosocial and neurocognitive (EEG) predictors and drivers of future ADHD symptom persistence and emergence of depression and suicidality in a follow-up study of adolescents and adults with ADHD. This project aims to inform future research on the efficacy of early identification and prevention strategies to reduce the impact of persistent ADHD and co-occurring depression and suicidality across development. We have also extended this project by developing prediction models for first-onset depression in young people from the general population and with ADHD, using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (Lu et al., 2025).
Barriers to recognition of co-occurring mental health problems
Thanks to funding from Research England, QMUL Centre for Public Engagement and ESRC, we are investigating the (a) barriers to recognition of mental health problems and (b) the lived experience and presentation of mental health problems in neurodivergent people. We are also interested in how neurodivergence intersects with other aspects of someone's identity, such as ethnicity. This work involves extensive co-production with charity organisations (eg Autistica and McPin Foundation) (described in this blog post), analysis of cohort data and a qualitative study with young people, parents/carers and professionals. We hope that our findings from this project will lead to earlier identification of mental health problems and better outcomes for neurodivergent young people.
Neurodiversity and transdiagnostic mental health
We lead an international network focused on integrating neurodivergent traits into transdiagnostic dimensional frameworks (e.g., the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology). The aim is to provide a better approach to classify, detect and treat co-occurring neurodivergent and mental health conditions, develop new assessments, and identify shared biological and psychosocial processes underlying their co-occurrence. Our work identified a "neurodevelopmental spectrum" capturing traits of neurodevelopmental conditions, in line with the concept of neurodiversity put forward by the neurodivergent community (for a review, see Michelini et al., 2024). This construct helps understand the concurrent and longitudinal association of neurodevelopmental traits with mental health conditions (Caserini et al., 2025) and functional outcomes (Michelini et al., 2019; Michelini et al., 2025).