LAUSR

Born near Bordeaux in 1974, Dr Peggy Seriès is a senior lecturer and principal investigator in the computational psychiatry laboratory at the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation (ANC), University of Edinburgh. Her career to date has included spells in prestigious computational neuroscience labs in France, New York and University College London. Her move into computational psychiatry was motivated, she says, partly by her own experience of anxiety, but also by witnessing the suffering due to mental illness of her students and the death by suicide of two of them. Essentially, the Bayesian brain hypothesis suggests that brains use probability calculations to make predictions about what we experience, based on sensory inputs and our prior experiences. Seriès’s research work focuses on using mathematical and computer models to understand how our expectations and prior beliefs about the world modulate our perception. In particular she is interested in differences in prior beliefs and learning in disorders such as schizophrenia, autism, depression and anxiety. Seriès edited and contributed to the first accessible textbook on the emerging field of computational psychiatry. For any clinicians feeling jaded, read it for an overview of computational approaches in your psychiatric field of interest and to get excited about psychiatry all over again. Seriès only started cycling competitively at the age of 39. Since then she has won multiple track cycling championships nationally and internationally, completed three half ironmans and is in training for a full ironman. In 2013 she cycled the full route of the Tour de France, considered one of the most gruelling endurance competitions in the world. This interview took place via Zoom in June 2021 and has been edited for length and clarity.