Máiréad Healy

Mairéad Healy is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Cambridge. Her research integrates computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and psychiatry to understand and model the mechanisms of metacognition and compulsivity. Her experimental work investigates the neurochemical basis of confidence calibration and decision-making in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) using 7-Tesla magnetic resonance spectroscopy and functional MRI. Her computational work applies reinforcement learning and Multimodal Trajectory Modelling (MTM) to large-scale health and population datasets to identify predictive markers of mental health risk and treatment response.

Mairéad completed her PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Professors Trevor Robbins and Zoe Kourtzi. She previously worked at the University of Oxford on MRC-funded research into developmental language disorders and has published in Nature Communications and Biological Psychiatry. She is funded by the Angharad Dodds John Bursary in Mental Health and Neuropsychiatry at Downing College and currently leads a project on AI-driven analysis of brain developmental trajectories funded by the Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery. Her broader research interests focus on translating principles of neural metacognition into artificial intelligence.