Saba Ishrat

Saba is a DPhil student supervised by Professor Klaus Ebmeier and Dr Anya Topiwala based at the Department of Psychiatry and Big Data Institute. Her research is generously funded by the Society for the Study of Addiction.

Her research focuses on the study of substance use and addiction on brain health. In her DPhil, she works on the impact of Cannabis exposure on brain structure and functional connectivity using brain imaging and further exploring its risks related to later life psychiatry and cognitive outcomes. Her research interest further aims to utilize genetic data to address the causal inference of cannabis use on long-term neurocognitive outcomes including dementia.

Prior to starting her DPhil in Oxford, she completed a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Psychology at Aligarh Muslim University (India) and a second Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Trento (Italy). She worked as a Research Intern at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany) investigating the fiber estimation and tractography in diffusion MRI by CSD and NODDI models. She then moved to the University Medical Center Utrecht (Netherlands) where she worked as a Junior Researcher on Medical Image Analysis on the EPISTOP project involving neuroimaging studies, investigating the biomarkers of epilepsy risks and neurodevelopment in infants with Tuberous Sclerosis Complex.

Alongside her DPhil studies, Saba is the Junior Dean at St Cross College, a committee member at St Edmund Hall's Centre for the Creative Brain, and a student associate of the Society for the Study of Addiction.