Delia Gheorghe- Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience, Cluj-Napoca

Delia is a researcher in Psychology and Neuroscience working to understand how our social circumstances, psychological events and our genes work together to shape our brains. After receiving formal training in Psychology (University of Bucharest; Bangor University, Wales), she completed her doctoral degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of East Anglia, where she demonstrated that acute psychosocial stressors affect brain functioning beyond the well-known “emotional” brain structures. She carried on showing that in large biobanks, self-reported familial adversity early in life leaves signatures on the brain that can be seen decades later. This latter work was conducted during her post-doc at the University of Oxford, where she trained in epidemiology and bioinformatics at the Department of Psychiatry. She is now a post-doctoral fellow at the Transylvanian Institute of Neuroscience (TINS) in Cluj-Napoca, where she is continuing this line of research in a Cluj-Oxford collaborative setup. Her current studies aim to further disentangle the effects of psychosocial adversity on the brain, using large epidemiological datasets from a UK-based data repository (Dementias Platform UK).