Amalie Couch

I am an early-career neuroscientist working in Professor Rachel Upthegrove’s group, investigating the links between immune dysfunction, brain structure, and severe mental illness.

Psychiatric disorders remain some of the least understood conditions in medicine, and their biological underpinnings are often obscured by clinical heterogeneity. My research aims to uncover how immune and metabolic processes influence brain development and function, and how their disruption contributes to psychosis and related disorders. I use multi-trait genetic colocalization approaches to identify shared causal variants between metabolic traits, brain structure, IL-6 signalling, and schizophrenia, and I study how genetic risk for psychosis influences proteomic aging in population cohorts such as UK Biobank.

I completed my PhD at King’s College London in the Department of Basic and Clinical Neuroscience, investigating how IL-6 (as a proxy for maternal immune activation) affects neurodevelopment using hiPSC-derived cortical neuron–microglia co-culture models. Following this, I contributed to the HappyMums project, studying how prenatal stress impacts offspring brain structure development in mouse models. I also earned an MRes in the Molecular Basis of Human Disease from Imperial College London and a BSc in Molecular Biology from University College London.