NIHR Clinical Lecturer
Research
My interests span cognitive neuroscience, AI in psychiatry ("computational psychiatry"), and psychopharmacology.
I am fascinated by how brain activity relates to cognition, affect, and behaviour, and believe a deeper understanding of this relationship will help us develop better clinical tools and treatments in psychiatry.
To investigate these questions, I use functional and molecular brain imaging (fMRI, MEG, PET), machine learning for neural data analysis, computational modelling of behaviour, natural language processing (NLP), and pharmacological interventions.
In my pre-doctoral work (at KCL and Imperial) I investigated the role of dopamine in the pathophysiology of psychotic disorders using functional neuroimaging (fMRI, PET) and computationally-informed behavioural tasks. During my PhD (at UCL) I used MEG and multivariate neural decoding to measure spontaneous memory reactivations (replay) in schizophrenia.
My current work uses functional neuroimaging (MEG, fMRI), naturalistic tasks, and AI models (inc. large language models) to investigate neuro-cognitive processes in psychiatric populations, particularly psychosis.
Key publications
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Trajectories through semantic spaces in schizophrenia and the relationship to ripple bursts.
Journal article
Nour MM. et al, (2023), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 120
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Natural Language Processing in Psychiatry: A Field at an Inflection Point.
Journal article
Nour MM. and Huys QJM., (2023), Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging, 8, 979 - 981
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Functional neuroimaging in psychiatry and the case for failing better
Journal article
Nour MM. et al, (2022), Neuron, 110, 2524 - 2544
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Impaired neural replay of inferred relationships in schizophrenia
Journal article
Nour MM. et al, (2021), Cell, 184, 4315 - 4328.e17
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Decoding cognition from spontaneous neural activity.
Journal article
Liu Y. et al, (2022), Nat Rev Neurosci, 23, 204 - 214
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Dopaminergic basis for signaling belief updates, but not surprise, and the link to paranoia.
Journal article
Nour MM. et al, (2018), Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 115, E10167 - E10176
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Task-induced functional brain connectivity mediates the relationship between striatal D2/3 receptors and working memory.
Journal article
Nour MM. et al, (2019), Elife, 8
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Mesolimbic Dopamine Function Is Related to Salience Network Connectivity: An Integrative Positron Emission Tomography and Magnetic Resonance Study.
Journal article
McCutcheon RA. et al, (2019), Biol Psychiatry, 85, 368 - 378
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Dopaminergic organization of striatum is linked to cortical activity and brain expression of genes associated with psychiatric illness.
Journal article
McCutcheon RA. et al, (2021), Sci Adv, 7
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The dopamine hypothesis of bipolar affective disorder: the state of the art and implications for treatment.
Journal article
Ashok AH. et al, (2017), Mol Psychiatry, 22, 666 - 679
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Variability in Action Selection Relates to Striatal Dopamine 2/3 Receptor Availability in Humans: A PET Neuroimaging Study Using Reinforcement Learning and Active Inference Models.
Journal article
Adams RA. et al, (2020), Cereb Cortex, 30, 3573 - 3589