People and Research
Click here to see a list of scientific papers published by members of autism@icn group.
Current members
Antonia Hamilton
Social Neuroscience group leader 
Sarah White
Developmental Diversity group leader 
James Ursell
Postdoctoral Research Fellow 
Ceci Qing Cai
Postdoctoral Research Fellow 
Katherine Ellis
Associate Lecturer 
Nevin Ozden
PhD Student 
Navaz Davoodian
Laina Townsend
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Professor Antonia Hamilton received a BSc in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from Oxford University in 1998, and then completed a PhD on the impact of neuronal noise for the optimal control of human arm movements with Daniel Wolpert. She then moved on to post-doctoral work on social cognition with Uta Frith and Scott Grafton. Her research aims to uncover the cognitive and brain mechanisms which allow us to make sense of other people's everyday actions and respond appropriately, and also to test if these systems differ in autistic people.
Dr Sarah White received her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Physiology from Oxford University, and completed her PhD in 2006 at UCL with Uta Frith and Elisabeth Hill. She is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow and, prior to this, has held a British Academy postdoctoral fellowship and an MRC/ESRC postdoctoral fellowship. Her research is concerned with understanding how the autistic mind processes and represents information, with a particular focus on implicit mentalizing. She’s especially interested in how these cognitive differences might affect other aspects of cognition and mental health in autism, and in autistic cognition in the Fragile X Premutation and Broader Autism Phenotype. Most recently, she’s begun investigating factors that can modulate mentalizing. She was also the Autism Research Coordinator from its founding in 2007 until 2013.
James Ursell joined the Developmental Diversity Lab in 2024 after completing an MSc in psychological sciences at UCL. His research interests are in novel applications of experience sampling methodology, and how mental health interventions can be adapted for people with co-occurring developmental conditions. James holds a doctorate in analytic philosophy and previously worked in policy and mental health roles. He is the current Autism Research Coordinator.
Ceci Qing Cai (蔡晴) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Developmental Diversity Group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), University College London. During her PhD in Speech and Communication Group at ICN, she investigated the socio-emotional essence of laughter in social communication, expanding our current understanding from non-autistic adults to autistic adults, under the guidance of Prof Sophie K Scott and Dr Sarah J White. Her original work bridged diverse academic fields, incorporating methods from self-report questionnaires, to behavioural experiments, to neuroimaging (fMRI). In 2021, Ceci was honoured with an International Society for Autism Research (INSAR) Student and Trainee Award. In 2023, she received a UCL Fellowship Incubation Award, enabling her to further study laughter production in face-to-face conversation from a neurodiversity perspective. Prior to her PhD, she spent several years working in industry, as well as engaging in various volunteering activities related to developmental conditions.
Katherine Ellis' research aims to understand social and emotional difficulties experienced by individuals with genetic syndromes associated with intellectual disability and autism. She researches how differences in social cognitive development, as well as sensory processing, may underpin social and emotional functioning in these groups. Katherine graduated in 2013 with a First Class Honours Degree in Psychology at the University of Birmingham. She completed her third year dissertation project with Prof. Chris Oliver at the Cerebra Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders, investigating social anxiety and social motivation behaviours in Cornelia de Lange Syndrome. This led to a PhD also at the Cerebra Centre, investigating development in social behaviours and sociocognitive skills across rare genetic syndromes, specifically Cornelia de Lange, Fragile X syndrome and Rubenstein-Taybi syndrome.
Nevin Ozden began her PhD in September 2022, focusing on the theory of mind in autistic individuals. Her research specifically explores the relationship between mentalizing and mental time travel (episodic memory and episodic future thinking) from a self-projection perspective.
Navaz Davoodian joined the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (IEDE)Light and Lighting Group in 2009 as a researcher. She currently work on two EPSRC funded projects; ‘Street Lighting Glare’ and ‘Mesopically Enhanced Road Lighting’. Prior to joining UCL she completed a PhD in Urban Lighting at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. She obtained an MArch in Architecture in 2001. Dr Davoodian's other research interests include the interaction of people with the built environment, visual/perceptual aspects of urban lighting, lighting master plans and social aspects of urban lighting including aging population.
Laina Townsend completed her MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at Birkbeck, University of London, before starting her PhD at UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in 2023. Her research explores social cognition through eye gaze in dyadic and triadic naturalistic conversations. Laina is also the lead demonstrator for the MSc Fundamental Statistics course in the Department of Psychology and Language Sciences.
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Collaborators and alumni
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Uta Frith
Paul Burgess Sam Gilbert David Attenborough Gillian Hughes Maryna Nosyk Ishita Chowdhury Roser Cañigueral Paul Forbes Flora Thiébaut Jo Moss Rebecca Lawson Ryan Oakeson Ruihan Wu Malwina Dziwisz Hannah Partington Lena Matyjek James Crum Sara de Felice Sujatha Krisnan-Barman Alexandra Georgescu Indu Dubey |
Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development
Metacognition & Executive Functions group leader Metacognition & Executive Functions group leader Previous Autism Research Coordinator (2024-2025) Previous Autism Research Coordinator (2023-2024). DPhil student at University of Oxford Previous Autism Research Coordinator (2019-2022) and PhD student at UCL. Lecturer at University of Surrey Previous Autism Research Coordinator (2018-2019). Post-doctoral researcher at UCL Previous Autism Research Coordinator (2014-2018). Post-doctoral researcher at University of Vienna Previous Autism Research Coordinator (2013-2014). Co-founder of Auticonsult (France) Associate professor at University of Surrey and NDevR group leader. Prediction and Learning Lab group leader (Cambridge University) Research assistant Research assistant |
