Ana-Maria Butura

In 2019 I completed my undergraduate degree in psychology with a First Class Honours at Royal Holloway University of London, followed by an MSc in Global Mental Health at King’s College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2020. My MSc dissertation focused on community-based rehabilitation for people with psychosocial disabilities in low- and middle-income countries, which I am in the process of getting published.

Directly after my MSc, I was successfully awarded an MRC DTP iCase PhD studentship within the ExPAND Research Group of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, investigating ADHD in females. My PhD will involve an industry placement with Qbtech.

Research interests

Title: Are young females with ADHD masking the signs of their condition? Developing digital/informatic techniques to identify and uncover hidden impairment and promote early intervention.

In my PhD I am investigating one hypothesis that might explain why female ADHD is missed until adolescence. I aim to identify - perhaps subtle - behavioural and cognitive markers of any hidden impairment associated with self-regulation problems experienced by girls in the primary-school years and examine their functioning correlates over a 12-month period. This could provide ways to screen young females and identify them early to facilitate timely, and perhaps more effective, interventions. The project is supervised by Prof Edmund Sonuga-Barke, Dr Johnny Downs and Dr Jacqueline Phillips-Owen.

Teaching

Teaching applied statistical methods to the students on the MSc in Child & Adolescent Mental Health.