The Medical Research Foundation have announced King's researchers Dr Gemma Knowles, Dr Maria Rogdaki and Dr Josefien Breedvelt as three of the four winners of their Emerging Leaders Prize 2025 for research into young people's mental health.
The theme of this year's Prize is 'Children and Young People's Mental Health'. One in five children in the UK experience a mental health condition, but despite this, over a third of those who are referred for NHS support services are not accepted into treatment. This highlights why further research funding is needed, to better understand how mental health conditions present themselves in young people and how diagnosis and prevention can be improved.
This year, there was £100,000 available for the first-place prize, with three second place prizes also awarded, each of extremely high quality. These studies will all contribute to protecting young people's mental health while also creating more supportive environments for them growing up.
Dr Gemma Knowles, Lecturer in Epidemiology and Youth Mental Health at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King's College London, was awarded the first-place prize for her project "Can sexism and misogyny explain why teenage girls are more likely to experience mental health conditions like anxiety and depression than teenage boys?". It has already been well established that teenage girls are more likely to experience anxiety and depression than teenage boys. Dr Knowles and her team will investigate these gender inequalities, expanding their current work to explore boys' experiences of sexism and misogyny, and how this might impact their mental health.
I'm really honoured and excited to receive the Emerging Leaders Prize. This support means we can look more closely at boys' experiences of and responses to sexism and misogyny, and how these experiences shape their social and emotional development. It builds on our Bridging Divides project and moves us closer to understanding - and tackling - gender inequalities in young people's mental health.
Dr Gemma Knowles, Lecturer in Epidemiology and Youth Mental Health at King's College London
Dr Maria Rogdaki, Clinical Lecturer at the IoPPN, and Dr Josefien Breedvelt, Prudence Trust Research Fellow at the IoPPN, were awarded the joint second-place prize (£80,000 and £40,000 respectively), alongside Dr Eleanor Leigh from the University of Oxford.
Dr Rogdaki's project, "How does a rare genetic disorder disrupt brain function and increase the risk of psychosis in young people?", will investigate the causes of psychosis in young people with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome - a genetic disorder which can lead to a diverse range of symptoms throughout the body and comes with an increased risk of autism, ADHD and mental health conditions with serious symptoms like psychosis. The team will explore this through brain imaging and laboratory-grown brain cells, with the ultimate aim of developing personalised treatments.
In Dr Breedvelt's project, "What factors make preventative mental health treatments more or less effective for different young people?", the team will work closely with young people to determine what the driving factors are that make a therapy either effective or not for a particular individual, allowing them to develop tailored preventative support for young people.
In Dr Leigh's project, "How can we more accurately measure feelings of interest and pleasure in young people with mental health conditions, and develop treatments to enhance these feelings?", the team will develop a new, more accurate and age-specific method for measuring anhedonia - a lack of pleasure or interest in things you would usually enjoy - in children and teenagers.
Half of all mental health issues start by the age of 14 and, despite an increasing awareness of these conditions in children and young people, research in this area remains significantly underfunded. That's why we're really pleased to be supporting these four researchers, who are already doing outstanding work to investigate the complex causes and social factors that are involved in mental health conditions, and develop new ways to prevent and treat them.
Dr Angela Hind, Medical Research Foundation CEO
Through the Emerging Leaders Prize, the Medical Research Foundation celebrates the achievements of scientists working in a specific field and support their ongoing research. The funding is designed to facilitate their career development, whether that be by investing in new technologies, undertaking training, or developing research internships.
