Paveen Phon-Amnuaisuk is a PhD student at the Gillan Lab at Trinity College Dublin, where he focuses on computational psychiatry and cognitive neuroscience. His research centers on understanding the development and exacerbation of psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) through the use of active and passive smartphone-based data. Paveen’s work aims to elucidate the dynamic interplay between environmental, behavioral, and cognitive factors in the progression of PLEs, contributing insights into its development and phenomenological experience.
Paveen holds a Bachelor of Psychological Sciences (Honours) from Monash University Malaysia, where he graduated with a First-Class. His Honour’s thesis explored the relationship between dispositional mindfulness, attentional mechanisms, and response inhibition, utilizing both behavioural, computational (drift diffusion), and event-related potential (ERP) analyses on a Go/no-Go task.
During his undergraduate studies, Paveen gained research experience in EEG under the #EEGMANYLABS initiative. The project aims to replicate influential EEG papers in psychology across a larger, intentionally diverse sample, using updated EEG pre-processing techniques. Notably, he was involved in the co-development of the task and EEG pre-processing pipeline. Concurrently, Paveen was also involved in the AGEWELL project, which aims to investigate multidimensional factors (i.e. neural, psychological, biological and economic) contributing to healthy brain ageing outcomes in a sample of senior citizens from the larger Kuala Lumpur metropolitan area in Malaysia. Specifically, Paveen was involved in conducting cortical thickness analysis on the MRI data acquired, and a related effort in mapping computational cognitive profiles of aging to brain and sociodemographic factors.
He aims to leverage computational and machine learning approaches in his current PhD project, which leverages digital phenotyping and smartphone-based assessments to model the temporal dynamics of PLEs and cognitive mechanisms underlying symptoms of psychosis. His research is currently supported by the Trinity Research Doctorate Award, alongside a collaborative team, using passive and active data from the Neureka app.
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