Simona Skripkauskaite

I am a senior postdoctoral researcher working across the Departments of Psychiatry and Experimental Psychology.

My research interests concern various aspects of mental health and social development with a particular focus on neurodiversity. I am particularly passionate about applying (and supporting others in doing so) advanced quantitative methods and statistics across experimental and longitudinal survey data to understand the complex processes underlying successful functioning and development across varying contexts.

Specifically, my current research focuses on:

• Child and adolescent mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am a UK principal investigator (PI) for an international the ESRC/JSPS project on Learning from the trajectories of mental health challenges for children, young people and parents across Japan and the UK over the course of COVID-19. My work in this project builds on my research for the Co-SPACE study tracking how children, young people, and parents have been affected since the start of the pandemic. The aim is to develop a further understanding of medium and long-term impacts of the pandemic on the mental health symptoms of young people and parents across countries, as well as co-design guidelines for policy makers and health authorities together with the young people in both countries. I also chair the international Co-SPACE consortium that combines researchers from over 10 countries investigating changes in child, adolescent, and parent mental health over the pandemic.
• Factors associated with adolescent mental health and support needs. I also conduct research within the OxWell Student Survey, a large schools-based a repeated cross-sectional design survey collecting data on a range of questions on mental ill-health and well-being, life experiences, and behaviours. Here, my work to date has focused on understanding the complex relationships between adolescent well-being and gaming or various online activities, including exposure to self-harm. My current further work focuses on support needs and online behaviours at the intersection of self-harm and neurodiversity. 
• Development of neurotypical and neurodivergent social attention. My previous postdoctoral (Bangor University) and PhD research (University of Roehampton) has mainly focused on understanding autistic and non-autistic social attention across the lifespan. I continue this work with my external collaborators, where I analyse eye-tracking and facial movement data during experimental paradigms.

For my full list of publications see my Google Scholar profile.