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Friederike Elisabeth Hedley, an MPhil graduate in the Department of Psychology, has been awarded the 2024 Gates Cambridge Scholarship.  She will start her doctoral studies in Psychology at the University of Cambridge this autumn.   

The Gates Cambridge Scholarship is highly competitive, with only about 1.3% of applicants awarded each year. This year, Friederike was one of 75 exceptional students from around the world to be granted this prestigious scholarship, which provides full financial support to outstanding students from countries outside the UK. The selection criteria include outstanding intellectual ability, leadership potential, a commitment to improving the lives of others, and justification for the choice of course at the University of Cambridge. This achievement is a testament to Friederike’s exceptional academic accomplishments and leadership potential.

Friederike completed her MPhil in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience in HKU’s Department of Psychology. During her studies, she investigated emotion-related perceptual decision making in individuals with and without internalising psychopathology. Using experimental paradigms, computational modelling methods, and clinical interviewing techniques, she examined the cognitive processing of those affected by anxiety and depressive disorders. Her findings included the discovery of some mechanisms underlying anxiety, for example, cognitive biases that arise when individuals make judgements about complex emotional scenes. 

She also first authored a conceptual paper using uncertainty decomposition in Bayesian statistics to explain potential maladaptation in anxiety, published in January 2024 the British Journal of Psychology (doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12693). Friederike connected with researchers within and outside Hong Kong, for example, by participating in the field’s leading conference, the Annual Meeting of the Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP), in the US. For this purpose, she travelled to Philadelphia in 2022 and to St. Louis in 2023. “I had an amazing time on these conference trips connecting with scholars from other institutions and countries, and it opened the doors to new research collaborations too,” she said.

In recognition of her outstanding oral presentation at the 23rd Annual Research Postgraduate Conference in June 2023, Friederike received the Certificate of Distinction. Her MPhil thesis was recognised as one of the highest quality and has been nominated for the Li Ka Shing Prize and the Award for Outstanding Research Postgraduate Student.

Since graduation, Friederike has been working as a teaching assistant for the Affective Neuroscience and Human Neuropsychology undergraduate courses and as a lab manager for the Psychopathology, Affective Neuroscience & Decision Making Lab. She also collaborates with Dr Carl Hildebrand, a philosopher in the Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit in the School of Clinical Medicine, HKU, on an interdisciplinary project. This work examines the virtues of empathy and forgiveness and their engagement in cases of deep disagreement. She is also part of a newly formed Psychology and Art working group, composed of art historians and cognitive scientists in Hong Kong.

Friederike will begin her PhD studies in Psychology at the University of Cambridge in September under the supervision of Professor Rebecca Lawson.  “I am grateful for my time at HKU, as it has instilled in me an academic curiosity to break new ground,” Friederike said. “Thanks to my wonderful supervisor, Dr Jingwen Frances Jin, I feel prepared and inspired to continue exploring meaningful research questions, and their important real-world applications.” 

At Cambridge, Friederike will focus on advancing neurobiological and psychological frameworks for mental disorders, particularly anxiety disorders. Her primary goal is to investigate learning under uncertainty in younger populations and its links to (maladaptive) cognitive processing. Additionally, Friederike intends to integrate computational approaches into the field of developmental psychopathology and to collaborate with experts from diverse disciplines to broaden the scope of her research.

Friederike (centre, front) with friends and lab mates in the West Kowloon Cultural District in front of the Hong Kong skyline.

Dr. Jingwen Frances Jin (left) and Friederike (right) at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the Society for Research in Psychopathology in St. Louis, MO, USA.