Professor Elaine Fox PhD

Fellow of the British Psychological Society, 2012

Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science, 2009

PhD, University College Dublin, 1988

BA/BSc (Hons), University College Dublin, 1983

Elaine Fox is a cognitive psychologist and affective scientist who has held academic posts in Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and Australia. She completed both her BA (Hons) and PhD degrees at University College Dublin. Following many years at the University of Essex, which included a period as Head of School of Psychology and Centre for Brain Science, she moved to the University of Oxford in 2012 to take up a Professorship of Psychology and Affective Science. She founded the Oxford Centre for Emotion & Affective Neuroscience (OCEAN), which worked at the interface of psychological science, molecular genetics, and neuroscience to deepen our understanding of resilience and emotional vulnerability. This work was facilitated by the award of a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, which is one of Europe’s most prestigious personal fellowships. In 2022, she was recruited to take up the role of Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Adelaide in South Australia and subsequently was seconded to a university-wide role of Director of Mental Health Science, with the aim of establishing a world-leading multidisciplinary centre for mental health research. She returned to the UK in 2025 and is delighted to join the University of Birmingham as Professor of Psychology. Elaine has served on several editorial boards of leading scientific journals in her field; she is a member of the Publications Committee of the Association for Psychological Science and has served as President of the Society for Affective Science. Elaine is a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. In addition to her academic work, Elaine is also passionate about bringing psychological science to a wider audience. Her bestselling book, Rainy Brain Sunny Brain was published in 2012 and her new book Switchcraft: Harnessing the Power of Mental Agility to Transform Your Life was published in 2022 and is packed full of science-based ways to cope and thrive in a complex and ever changing world.

I am interested in supervising PhD students on the cognitive and neural factors implicated in anxiety and depression as well as resilient functioning.

Elaine is interested in the cognitive, neural, and genetic factors associated with vulnerability to mental ill-health, especially anxiety, in young people and adults.