Bio
Luisa is entering her second PhD year at the University of Cambridge, where she works across the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the Department of Psychiatry. Her current research focuses on disentangling the links between social media use and adolescents' mental health. She is supervised by Dr Amy Orben and Prof Tamsin Ford. Luisa previously completed an Master of Science in Psychological Research at the University of Oxford, specialising in research methods and design. Previously, she completed a Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. During her academic path, Luisa has worked on research projects in the fields of molecular psychiatry, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. Alongside her interest in psychological and medical sciences, Luisa is an active promoter of open research practices. She is a junior representative of RIOT, a Science Club promoting reproducible, interpretable, open, and transparent practices. Moreover, she is a Data Champion at the University of Cambridge and a certified instructor for The Carpentries, for which she teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers.
Research interests
Luisa’s doctoral research focuses on understanding the impact of social media use on adolescents’ mental health. Social media are a pervasive component of young people’s everyday life. However, empirical evidence is sparse despite the widespread public concern around their potential impact on youth’s well-being and mental health. Specifically, their association with and effect on different mental health conditions is still an open question. In her PhD, Luisa addresses this question by analysing data from large-scale national surveys to examine the associations and directional links between social media use and mental health outcomes for adolescents affected by different clinical conditions (e.g., mood disorders, conduct disorders, eating disorders) as compared to adolescents from the general population. At Turing, Luisa aims to broaden her training in quantitative analysis of large-scale and multidimensional data.