Project Team
Dear World Project is a collaboration between scientists at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and artists and makers. We combine our approaches of art and science to open up conversations around mental health.
Click on an image below to learn more about each of our team.
CORE TEAM
Julia Vogl
Julia is American & British with an international practice. She makes social sculpture and installations that are engaging with site and colourfully form community.
Cassandra Hugill
Cassandra is the Public Engagement Manager at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. She currently oversees a large public engagement program with a vision of engaging people with neurological and psychiatric conditions to meaningfully to contribute to the research.
Rachel Bedder
Rachel is a PhD student interested in how knowledge of our futures affects our mood and decision-making. As Science Curator at AXNS Collective, she has worked on many varied Public Engagement projects.
Alban Low
Alban is a London based artist involved in a variety of creative projects. He illustrates album artwork, publishes books, makes films, designs maps, and organises inclusive exhibitions. He is artist-in-residence at the School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education at Kingston University and St George’s University of London.
Faye Watson
Faye was the Science Communications Officer at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. She supported Cassandra whilst managing the Centre’s communications including website and social media.
Joanne Thomas
Joanne is the Public Engagement Coordinator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. She supports Cassandra in the delivery of the Public Engagement programme.
EXHIBITION TEAM
Tom Berry
Tom is and artist and illustrator. His work is motivated by pleasure and sensation rather than particular verbal ideas, although storytelling and the human form are themes that recur in his work.
Anjali Bhat
Anjali is a PhD student who is interested in how brains and bodies navigate the inevitable uncertainty of the world. She is currently studying how we direct our attention, and unusual variations of that “directing” process that contribute to disorders such as schizophrenia.
Rutie Borthwick
Rutie is an artist who creates installations that re-awaken the viewers inner child with tactile sensory experiences.
Steve Fleming
Steve leads the Metacognition Group whose research focuses on the mechanisms supporting conscious awareness and metacognition in the adult human brain.
Calum Guinea
Calum is a neuroscience student interested in decision making, emotion and their interaction. He is particularly interested in disorders like anxiety and depression where negative emotional experiences are intensified.
Tobias Hauser
Tobias is a senior research associate and principal investigator interested in the neurocomputational processes underlying learning and decision making, and how these go awry in psychiatric disorders.
Alex Hopkins
Alex is a PhD student who is researching how uncertainty affects learning and decision-making in anxiety.
Joceline Howe
Rebecca James
Rebecca is an artist exploring new perspectives in the structure of organic systems, and ideas of living presence and communication with other organisms.
Harley Kuyck-Cohen
Harley explores the shifting territories between public and private space by introducing a range of important questions surrounding materiality. Working across a range of different media including sculpture, architecture, installation and time based assemblages he questions the politics of living.
Kelly Lloyd
Kelly is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist who focuses on issues of representation and knowledge production. Her work prioritises public-facing collaborative research.
Alisa Loosen
Alisa is a PhD student on the Comp2Psych Programme investigating the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder from a developmental perspective.
Andrew McWilliams
Andrew is a specialist registrar in child & adolescent psychiatry. As part of the Mental Health and Justice Project hosted in collaboration with King’s College London, he is undertaking a PhD researching interactions between metacognition and how society assesses whether someone is able to make decisions for themselves.
Nicole Morris
Nicole is an artist exploring the habits, rituals, and functions of the human body and mind through film, sculpture, textiles and installation.
Elisa van der Plas
Elisa is a PhD student working to understand how well people know what they want and how people influence each other’s preferences. She investigates how people change their minds when the (social) world around them changes.
Giulia Ricci
Giulia is a visual artist working with drawing and triangles. In her work she aims to translate the experience of tactility into a visual image and she is interested in the haptic quality of geometric patterns.
Cathryn Shilling
Cathryn is an internationally renowned glass artist. For her, kiln formed glass has proved to be the perfect medium, allowing for creative and technical freedom and enabling her to produce works that are tactile, intriguing and enduring.
Matilde Vaghi
Matilde is a research fellow interested in how individual differences in the ability of selecting the best course of action relate to mood. More generally she uses cognitive neuroscience approaches to understand symptoms of psychiatric disorders such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The Wickers Charity
The Wickers Charity aims to give young people a safe and positive space to interact and learn. A group of young people from the charity were involved in the project.
POP-UP COLLABORATORS
Benjamin Chew
Benjamin is a PhD student whose interests lie in the neuroscience of decision-making and affective states. His work aims to bridge the explanatory gap between brain and behaviour.
Magda Dubois
Magda is a PhD student interested in the role of curiosity in decision making, how it changes across the lifespan and how it differs in developmental disorders such as ADHD.
Sankalp Garud
Sankalp is an MRes student in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. He is working to understand the influence of momentary happiness on decision making.
Noor Sajid
Noor is a PhD student researching how individuals recover their language abilities (i.e., speech perception and production) post-neurological disorders using computational modelling.
Yuki Shimura
Yuki is a PhD student interested in the relationship between altruism and happiness.