Mingrun Shi joined the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London as a PhD student in October 2022. His research focuses on using multimodal neuroimaging, including magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and functional MRI (fMRI), to investigate the relationships between brain mechanisms—such as metabolite levels, functional connectivity, and cortical firing activity—and behavioural symptoms in neurodevelopmental disorders, primarily autism. His work spans pharmacological studies, including investigations of psilocybin and clobazam effects on excitation–inhibition balance, as well as large-scale multi-site datasets such as AIMS-2-TRIALS and LEAP. He has extensive experience in both data acquisition and analysis across diverse contexts, from pharmacological studies to clinical and cohort-based research.

He leads a pilot study collecting 7T MRS, fMRS, and fMRI data at St Thomas’ Hospital. He is proficient in neuroimaging pipelines and analytical tools including MATLAB, Python, R, FSL, Osprey, and Gannet, and has experience integrating multimodal datasets with behavioural assessments of sensory, motor, and social function.

He holds a BSc of Life Science from Nanjing University and is pursuing his PhD at King’s College London.

Research Interests

• Multimodal neuroimaging of neurodevelopmental disorders (MRS, fMRS, fMRI, 7T MRI)
• Neural mechanisms underlying sensory, motor, and social differences in autism
• Pharmacological modulation of excitation–inhibition balance in the human brain (e.g., psilocybin, clobazam)
• Integration of neuroimaging and behavioural data for understanding individual differences

Research Groups

Sensory Inputs Lab

KCLMIND Lab

Teaching

As a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Forensic and Neurodevelopmental Sciences at King’s College London, I support teaching on the MSc Clinical Neurodevelopmental Sciences programme.

My teaching contributions include the following modules:

• Introduction to Applied Statistical Methods  
• Research Methods and Statistics