Chrysie Alexiou joined the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry (SGDP) Centre at King’s College London in October 2025 for her PhD on the Medical Research Council’s Doctoral Training Programme, supervised by Professor Francesca Happé and Dr Matthew Hollocks.

Her PhD explores the role of self-compassion in the mental health of autistic youth. She will be using a mixed-methods approach, informed by focus groups of autistic individuals, to understand the best ways to measure self-compassion and to examine the relationship between self-compassion and mental health in autistic youth. To do so, Chrysie aims to compile existing research to formulate a definition of self-compassion and use data from the OxWell Student Survey to begin parsing the nature of how self-compassion relates to the mental health of youth, especially those with neurodevelopmental disorders like autism.

Before beginning her PhD, Chrysie completed her MRes at UCL and Yale University. At the Yale Child Study Centre, Chrysie’s year-long placement in the Sukhodolsky Lab facilitated her thesis exploring how the relationship between the functional network connectivity of three key brain networks (default mode, central executive and salience networks) affects the transdiagnostic symptoms of anxiety and social function. She used a transdiagnostic sample of youth, including those with no history of neurodevelopmental or psychiatric conditions, those with autism, autism and anxiety, and disruptive behaviour disorders. Chrysie completed her BSc (Joint Hons) at King’s College London as part of the inaugural class of Neuroscience and Psychology, to which she credits her interest in research and blames for her ongoing detour into clinical practice.