Clara Albiñana

Clara Albiñana is a Lundbeck Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College. Her research uses large-scale biobank, genomic and molecular datasets to investigate the biological mechanisms underpinning psychiatric disorders. She is particularly interested in understanding the sources of clinical heterogeneity in mood disorders and in identifying biologically informative subtypes that could support more precise approaches to prevention and treatment. 

Her current work focuses on circadian biology as a potential contributor to this heterogeneity. She investigates how individual differences in biological timing, sleep and circadian alignment relate to depression, combining population-scale data with molecular and proteomic approaches. A major focus of her research is the development of scalable blood-based measures of internal circadian time that could enable circadian biology to be studied in large population cohorts and, ultimately, help identify clinically relevant patterns of circadian dysregulation in mental health.