Matthew Iveson

Senior Research Fellow

  • Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 7.94
Kennedy Tower
Morningside Place

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH10 5HF

Background

I moved to Edinburgh in 2005, where I completed my undergraduate degree (Psychology), MSc by Research and PhD. 

Since my Masters I have been interested in how cognition changes with age, and how this coincides with physical changes in the brain. During my PhD, run bilaterally between the University of Edinburgh and Suor Orsola Benincasa University (Italy), I gained an appreciation for the contribution of individual differences in demographic factors and general cognitive ability to age-related changes in cognition. After my PhD I  led a research project in Kyoto (Japan) as a JSPS Post-doctoral Fellow.  I returned to Edinburgh in 2016, taking up a position as a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, workind jointly with the Administrative Data Research Centre Scotland.

I have since been involved in various mental health data science projects including an MRC Mental Health Data Pathfinder project, the Wellcome-funded AMBER project and DATAMIND - the HDR UK hub for mental health data. My research focuses on using routinely-collected health and administrative data to identify mental ill health and to track changes in mental health over time, as well as identifying and predicting treatment outcomes (e.g., treatment resistance). I also work to develop the mental health data landscape and to produce tools that help researchers looking to use routinely-collected data for mental health research.

Qualifications

PhD Psychology, Suor Orsola Benincasa University & The University of Edinburgh 2011 – 2015 

MSc by Research Psychology, The University of Edinburgh 2009 – 2010

MA (Hons.) Psychology, The University of Edinburgh 2005 – 2009

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Research summary

I am interested in better understanding mental health and treatment response, how these can be predicted by factors from across the life-course, and how we can determine which treatments will work for which people.

Current research interests

My current interests are in identifying response (and non-response) to antidepressant treatment using electronic health records, both using structured data and from free-text data, and deriving reproducible phentoypes and tools for other researchers to use.

Past research interests

I am also interested in cognitive ageing and age-related conditions such as dementia, and how these may be impacted by early-life circumstances such as deprivation, education and cognitive ability in childhood.

Knowledge exchange

I am involved in several public enagagement activities around:

  • The use of NHS data and administrative data, including clinical free-text, in mental health research
  • The value of data linkage studies and e-cohorts for researchers, patients and service providers

I also work with government and service providers to help improve:

  • Research services and data access procedures, to make them clearer and easier for researchers
  • Data resources, to develop meta-data and to add important data to existing collections
  • Research tools, to derive more useful variables and to enable researchers to reproduce analyses

Affiliated research centres

Project activity

RAS-24-2; Iveson MH (PI) 2024-2025; Research Data Scotland Accelerator Award: "Antidepressant exposure, response and resistance in Severe Mental Illness – patterns and consequences"

226770/Z/22/Z; Lewis C (PI) 2023-2028; Wellcome Mental Health Award: "Understanding the causal mechanisms of antidepressant exposure and response" - Work Package 2: Phenotyping antidepressant response

MC_PC_17209; McIntosh AM (PI) 2018-2020; MRC Mental Health Pathfinder Award: “Leveraging routinely collected and linked research data to study the causes and consequences of common mental disorders” - Work Package 1: Mental health within and between generations.

Current project grants

RAS-24-2; Iveson MH (PI) 2024-2025; Research Data Scotland Accelerator Award: "Antidepressant exposure, response and resistance in Severe Mental Illness – patterns and consequences"

226770/Z/22/Z; Lewis C (PI) 2023-2028; Wellcome Mental Health Award: "Understanding the causal mechanisms of antidepressant exposure and response" - Work Package 2: Phenotyping antidepressant response

Past project grants

MC_PC_17209; McIntosh AM (PI) 2018-2020; MRC Mental Health Pathfinder Award: “Leveraging routinely collected and linked research data to study the causes and consequences of common mental disorders” - Work Package 1: Mental health within and between generations.