Valerie runs research groups across Cambridge and Shanghai and holds professorships at Cambridge University and Fudan University. She is the current president of the BNPA. She focuses on interventional psychiatry anchored on mechanisms underlying self-control and repetitive behaviours relevant to addictions and compulsivity. Her research group focuses on identifying anatomical and functional biomarkers sensitive to invasive and non-invasive leading towards precision neuromodulation.

Abstract Deep brain stimulation is effective for treatment of refractory movement disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder with increasing interest in targeting neuropsychiatric disorders. This talk asks how we might optimize stimulation parameters and targeting to shift behavioural outcomes. I discuss physiological substrates underlying negative emotional processing, anticipation of reward and loss, and risk taking recorded using intracranial electrodes across a network from deep brain stimulation and stereotactic electroencephalography. I address how stimulation at specific frequencies might influence behavioural measures. These studies provide insight underlying the physiological network of these cognitive processes and ultimately leading towards optimizing neuromodulation parameters to treat clinical psychiatric disorders.