Dr Megan Skelton’s research focuses on understanding the development and treatment of common mental health conditions, with a particular interest in anxiety disorders. She is a member of Professor Thalia Eley’s EDIT Lab at the Social, Genetic & Developmental Psychiatry Centre, specialising in integrating environmental and genetic information to address questions in mental health.

Currently, she is working on the Treatment Outcome Prediction Study (TOPS), combining electronic health records with genetic data to investigate factors influencing outcomes following anxiety treatment. She also works with the Psychiatric Genetics Consortium Anxiety Working Group (PGC-ANX) and is co-leading two large-scale genome-wide meta-analyses of anxiety phenotypes.

Dr Skelton joined the SGDP Centre in 2017 as 1+3 (MSc + PhD) student, supervised by Professors Thalia Eley and Gerome Breen. Her PhD focused on treatment-related phenotypes in anxiety and depression, using longitudinal structural equation modelling and genetic analyses. Her work often involves data from longitudinal cohort studies including the GLAD Study, TEDS, and UK Biobank, as well as electronic health records from the NHS Talking Therapies services (previously called IAPT).

Before joining King’s College London, Dr Skelton completed a BSc in Psychology at the University of Leeds, where she also worked as a Research Assistant.

Research interests 

• Common mental health conditions, particularly anxiety
• Functional impairment associated with mental health symptoms
• Psychological treatment outcomes
• Electronic health records
• Integrating longitudinal and genetic data to answer questions about mental health