Jessica McFadyen
PhD
PhD
I have a Bachelors of Psychological Science (Hons I) and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from the University of Queensland, Australia. In my PhD, I used brain imaging and computational modelling to study brain pathways that process emotional facial expressions. I then moved to the UK and worked as a research fellow at UCL (in the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research). There, I examined how people with higher anxiety decide whether to approach or avoid risky situations, and how future scenarios are rapidly played out in the brain.
I then stepped into the start-up mental health sector as a Senior Scientist at Alena, where I developed and designed mobile games to predict the extent to which different people with social anxiety will benefit from different therapeutic tools. Afterwards, I joined the AI movement as a Lead Clinical Researcher at Limbic AI, helping lead the research and development behind innovative AI-enabled solutions to the global supply-demand problem in mental healthcare.
I'm now at the bleeding edge of AI capability research, operating as a Senior Scientist within the UK's AI Security Institute. Here, I'm helping advance the science of AI evaluation as it becomes increasingly critical for policy.
For an up-to-date list of publications, visit my google scholar profile.