Ritika Chokhani

I am a PhD student on the UCL-Wellcome program in Mental Health Science. I am doing my PhD at the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit with Prof. Eamon McCrory and Prof. Essi Viding. I am interested in how childhood trauma influences our relationship with our social world and thereby our mental health.

Before my PhD, I received a full scholarship by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation to do my MSc at UCL in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice between 2014-2016. I then worked at Ummeed Child Development Center, Mumbai as an autism therapist and researcher between 2016-2018. Between 2018-2020, I did my MPhil in Clinical Psychology at NIMHANS, India, involving a mixed-methods study on dating violence and its association with mental health, gender role-attitudes and self-efficacy. Between 2020-2023, I worked in part-clinical, part-research roles, including being involved in a policy project to update the national guidelines for disaster mental health in India as well as doing some teaching and supervision at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai on the Masters in Applied Psychology.