Home•About Us•Our People•Vanessa Teckentrup
A head and shoulders photo of a woman with short blonde hair, smiling and looking at the camera. She is wearing a thick cream turtle neck and is standing in a garden area.

Vanessa Teckentrup

Dr, Trinity College Dublin

Thematic Area:

Digital Health

Disease Area:

Mental Health

Dr Vanessa Teckentrup graduated from University of Frankfurt/Main with an MSc in Psychology and from University of Tübingen with a PhD in Neuroscience. In her graduate research, she used functional imaging and non-invasive stimulation of the vagus nerve to assess how the brain deals with disturbances in energy homeostasis, a concept closely linked to depression as individuals report changes in their appetite and sleep as key symptoms.  

This work sparked a deeper interest in how individual behaviour and more specifically mental health fluctuate over time. Thus, her postdoctoral research at Trinity College Dublin focused on using smartphones to leverage the rich information contained in high-density, repeated assessments of cognition, mood, and mental health symptoms over time.  

For her NeuroAdapt fellowship, she now applies these skills to further our understanding of when, how and for whom cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in depression works. In collaboration with two clinical sites and a pioneering digital mental health platform, her project aims to use smartphones to follow individuals through eight weeks of an internet-based CBT programme for depression, where she hopes to learn more about what drives deteriorations or improvements in mental health on an individual level.