Professor Eamon McCrory

Prof. McCrory oversees all of the UCL postgraduate programmes at the Anna Freud Centre. Since 2006 he led the creation of one of the UK’s leading educational portfolios in child and adolescent mental health, helping to train a new generation of researchers and clinicians. For many years he was also Director of the MRes in Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology with Yale which he established. Professor McCrory continues to contribute teaching across several programmes, particularly focusing on the impact of childhood adversity, mental health vulnerability and advances in neuroscience research.

Professor McCrory is best known for his work on childhood adversity, maltreatment and the brain. He is interested in why mental health problems develop, and has investigated how childhood trauma can impact brain structure and function in ways that may lead to an increased risk of later psychiatric disorder. He has argued in his theory of Latent Vulnerability that alterations in brain structure and function, associated with childhood maltreatment, may in part represent adaptation to early dangerous or unpredictable environments that can create increased mental health risk in the longer term. His research has documented altered functioning in an array of neurocognitive systems, including the threat, reward and autobiographical memory systems. He has recently argued for the importance of viewing the brain as a social organ, suggesting that mental health vulnerability following childhood maltreatment can in part be understood as a socially mediated process.

Prof. McCrory is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, having trained at King’s College London. He has expertise in working with children who have experienced severe forms of trauma presenting with complex comorbid presentations. He has had a particular interest in working with children and young people with conduct problems and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Prof. McCrory has published over 120 peer reviewed papers in the fields of child and adolescent mental health and cognitive neuroscience.

See: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-sciences/professor-eamon-mccrory for an up to date list.