Spotlight On: Margherita Zenoni
We are back with our 'Spotlight On' interview series, shedding light on inspiring women working in the field of neuroscience and reflecting on their distinct backgrounds and career journeys. The questions posed to these individuals explore the themes of job perks and challenges, developing new skills, their inspirations in the neuroscience field, and goals for the future. Stay tuned to see new interviews every few weeks from women in a range of neuroscience-related professions!
We interviewed Margherita Zenoni, a PhD researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, whose work examines the relationship between trauma, memory and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Alongside her research, she is a dedicated mental health advocate and science communicator, drawing on her own lived experience of OCD to inform her work at Orchard OCD and beyond. In our conversation, Margherita reflects on her research into how traumatic experiences may shape the onset and course of OCD, and her commitment to building more open, accessible and patient-centred mental health research.
Can you tell us about your background in science and what interested you about neuroscience initially?
I came to neuroscience through a deep curiosity about a deceptively simple question: how can the same brain that allows us to imagine, plan, love, create and connect also become caught in patterns of fear, rumination and hopelessness that feel impossible to escape?
I believe I first asked myself this question during a period of considerable personal difficulty. I was seventeen and had begun experiencing the first symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), though I had no idea at the time just how significant an impact this would have on the following three years of my life - for that is how long my first episode of OCD lasted.
From that point onwards, I became increasingly captivated by the study of the brain, first during my BSc in Psychology (Sigmund Freud University) and then during my MSc (University College London) in Clinical Mental Health Sciences. I found myself continuously fascinated by how much of our emotional and everyday life - the thoughts we have, the memories we form, the decisions we make – could be potentially traced back to processes occurring at the neuronal level. What ultimately became the focal point of my interest is how neuroscience can illuminate the brain mechanisms underlying often misunderstood forms of suffering, such as OCD, trauma and other psychiatric conditions, without ever flattening the human complexity of those who live with them. For me, understanding the biology is never about reducing a person to their brain; it is about honouring the full weight of their lived experience while also giving it a language that can be studied, treated and, ultimately, better understood by others. Under the best conditions, it is precisely through this kind of neuroscience that the development of innovative pharmacological treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders becomes possible.
Another aspect of the brain that fascinates me enormously, and one that neuroscience allows us to investigate, is its plasticity. What I find particularly compelling is a more nuanced understanding that has emerged from contemporary research: it is not simply the case that our brain is shaped by our genes and by our external environment, but rather that our genetics and our “internal environment” - our neurobiology and our physiological states — actively shape how we behave within, and respond to, the world around us. In other words, I find it incredibly interesting that the relationship between brain and behaviour is not a one-way street; it is a continuous, bidirectional dialogue in which the brain is as much an architect of our environment as it is a product of it.
My path has therefore developed at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry, three disciplines that are, ultimately, united by a shared endeavour: understanding the mind and behaviour by uncovering the biological and psychological mechanisms that underpin them and translating that understanding into more effective ways of alleviating human suffering, always with an appreciation for the person behind the illness.
Please could you tell us about your experience interning at the World Health Organisation (WHO) - what was that like, what did your role involve, and how have you brought the skills that you developed there to academia?
My internship at the World Health Organisation was generally formative, and it's worth saying upfront that I actually did it remotely, because it fell right in the middle of the Covid pandemic. In some ways that could have made it a less rich experience, but it really didn't - if anything, it taught me early on that meaningful, collaborative work can happen across borders and screens, which, funnily enough, mirrors quite a lot of how global health and policy work actually gets done in practice.
What the internship gave me, above all, was a sense of mental health within a genuinely global and policy-oriented context. I worked primarily on WHO's MiNDbank, which is a global repository of national and international mental health and human rights laws and policies. Working on that really brought home to me that evidence doesn't exist in a vacuum - research has to be translated into legal frameworks, interpreted across very different cultures, and implemented within health systems that can vary enormously in terms of resources and capacity.
That experience also strengthened my ability to work across quite different types of information - scientific evidence, legal texts, policy documents - and to pull out the central principles underpinning effective, rights-based mental health care. It also deepened my understanding that mental health isn't shaped by biology and psychology alone; it's shaped just as much by governance, legislation, and by whether human rights are protected or, in some cases, absent altogether.
Perhaps the most important thing I gained was a much sharper appreciation for the gap that can exist between producing evidence and actually ensuring that it informs policy and practice in a meaningful way. It really highlighted, for me, how important clarity, accessibility and accountability are in how we communicate research, especially when that research has the potential to shape systems affecting millions of people.
I've wanted to carry that perspective straight into academia: in my PhD, and in my work at Orchard OCD, I try not to think only about whether a question is scientifically interesting, but also about who it actually matters to, how different audiences might interpret the findings, and what could get in the way of a promising idea translating into real, meaningful change.
That mindset has shaped how I work with people with lived experience, how I communicate research to the public, and how I think about the responsibilities that come with producing knowledge in the first place. Good science needs precision, of course, but once you start sharing that science more widely, it also demands clarity, humility, and a genuine sense of purpose.
Your current research focuses on OCD - what questions drive your PhD research, and what have you found most surprising or challenging so far?
My PhD examines the relationship between traumatic experiences, memory processes and OCD. The central question is how trauma might shape the development and phenomenology of OCD.
This is an important question because research seems to suggest that trauma is neither necessary nor sufficient for developing OCD, and not all the people with OCD necessarily experience trauma (and many people who experience trauma do not develop OCD). However, a growing body of research suggests that, for a meaningful subgroup of individuals, traumatic or adverse life experiences not only seem to act as a catalyst for the onset of the full-blown condition, but they may also influence how OCD presents, what obsessions and compulsions become focused on and, crucially, to which extent the person benefits (or does not benefit) from current first-line treatments.
My work is increasingly focused on understanding how biological vulnerability and life experience interact to shape the development of OCD. We know, from decades of research, that OCD has a strong neurobiological component: differences in brain circuits involved in threat detection, habit formation and error monitoring - particularly networks linking the orbitofrontal cortex, striatum and thalamus - can make some individuals more sensitive to uncertainty, risk and the possibility of harm. At the same time, these biological tendencies do not operate in isolation. They are constantly shaped by a person’s environment, including the kinds of experiences they have, the meanings they attach to those experiences, and the strategies they develop to cope with them.
For some people, adverse or traumatic experiences may interact with this underlying vulnerability in ways that amplify certain fears or beliefs. For example, experiences involving threat, loss of control, or moral injury can heighten a person’s sense of responsibility, danger or contamination, and these concerns can then become organised into that loop of repetitive thoughts and behaviours that form the core component of OCD. Importantly, this does not mean that OCD is simply a direct consequence of trauma, nor that symptoms are a literal replay of past events. Rather, the disorder often reflects an attempt, albeit an ultimately unhelpful one, to manage deeply felt uncertainty, fear, doubt or guilt. In this sense, OCD can sometimes be understood as the brain’s effort to impose order, predictability or safety in situations where those things once felt profoundly absent.
I think one of the most challenging aspects of this work is also one of the most important: resisting simplistic explanations. People’s histories are complex, and so too are the biological, psychological and emotional architectures through which those histories are lived and remembered. The aim is, therefore, not to impose a single explanatory model, but to identify meaningful pathways that can help move us towards more personalised and effective care.
Your nominator described you as “an exceptional early‑career neuroscientist and communicator whose unique path bridges lived experience, research, and public engagement.” If you feel comfortable, could you share how your lived experience shapes your scientific work, how you navigate the balance between being a researcher and advocate, and what advice you would offer to early‑career researchers working in mental‑health‑related fields?
My lived experience certainly contributes to shaping the questions I ask, but I am very careful not to confuse personal experience with “universal expertise”. Living with OCD clearly showed me how incredibly different the disorder looks and feels from the “inside” compared with the way it is often portrayed from the “outside”. It gave me a first-hand understanding of the psychological isolation, shame and exhaustion that accompany it, but also of the extraordinary courage people with OCD show every time they seek professional support to claim their lives back.
I initially felt a deep sense of insecurity about sharing my lived experience of OCD publicly, largely because of the vulnerability that comes with revealing something so intimate and so often misunderstood. Over time, however, that hesitation gave way to a growing clarity: that silence, while perhaps protective in the short term, can also inadvertently sustain the very stigma and isolation that make conditions like OCD so difficult to live with. Although disclosure of mental health issues is never an obligation, what I can certainly say is that publicly sharing my lived experience of OCD was ultimately liberating, and the quantity of messages of thanks that I’ve received afterwards from strangers, across and outside the UK, made me realise that I had made the right choice.
My advice to early-career researchers working in mental-health-related fields would be – independently on whether they have lived experience or not – to always be mindful of the influence that their research is having on the people it aims to serve and, more generally, on the wider community. I would encourage them to make sure that every time they approach a new research question, that what they’re doing is not merely a stimulating intellectual exercise, but something with the potential of improving someone’s quality of life.
You’ve spoken so powerfully about the importance of using your experiences to challenge stigma and improve the lives of others.
Alongside this advocacy work, it’s amazing that you have managed to secure several large pots of funding for conferences relating to OCD. How do you manage this alongside your PhD work and what advice would you give to people who are wanting to pursue the organisation of something similar for their own fields of research?
I see research fundraising, and the organisation of scientific events, as an integral part of being a researcher, rather than as something separate from research itself. Scientific progress does not happen only because good questions are asked; it also requires resources, infrastructure, collaboration, and spaces where people from different disciplines can think together. This is why grant writing and strategic fundraising at Orchard OCD - the non-profit organisation that funds my PhD - have become such a central part of my work.
In OCD, I think one of the most effective approaches has been to show the scale of the problem from multiple perspectives. Of course, the human cost is the one I personally care more about: OCD can be profoundly disabling and can affect every aspect of a person’s life. However, I have also found it powerful to communicate the wider clinical, societal and economic impact of the condition, including the burden on the NHS, families, workplaces and society more broadly. Funders need to understand not only that a problem matters, but why addressing it could create meaningful change beyond the borders of your field.
Managing this alongside my PhD can sometimes be difficult, and I would not want to romanticise that. There are periods when the workload is particularly intense and when balancing research, writing, fundraising and event organisation becomes a source of stress. What keeps me going in those moments is a strong personal commitment to the cause, which goes beyond the profession. I care deeply about improving the future of OCD research, and that sense of purpose reminds me that it is worth it even when it is exceptionally demanding. My experience, so far, has taught me that no great achievement emerges without some form of pressure, much like diamonds forming under the weight of the earth.
My advice to researchers who want to develop something similar in their own field would be to start by asking why it needs to happen in the first place. That question is essential because it moves the focus away from simply organising an event or writing a funding application, and towards the problem you are trying to solve. What is missing in the field? Which conversations are not happening? Whose perspectives are absent? What gap would this project fill?
Once that is clear, I think the next step is to understand the existing landscape. Has someone else already done something similar, or is someone currently trying to? If so, could you collaborate rather than duplicate effort? If not, and you are genuinely pioneering something, what would be the best first step? Sometimes that might be a conference, sometimes a workshop, a public lecture series, a pilot study, a patient and public involvement initiative, or a network-building project. The key is to think beyond the immediate output and ask whether the project could become a springboard for longer-term impact.
In the funding application itself, I would try to make the case as clearly as possible: what clinical, societal or economic issue is the project addressing; why is the timing important; how will the project respond to that need in practical terms; and why are you and your collaborators well placed to deliver it? In my experience, funders respond to clear purpose, ambitious but realistic goals, credible partnerships, and evidence that the work has the potential to create lasting benefit not only for the field but ideally, for society more widely as well.
Patient and public engagement is increasingly recognised as an essential part of research. How do you navigate communicating with patients/the public, and how have you secured opportunities like features in The Telegraph and on podcasts? How do you recommend PhD students get more involved in public engagement early in their career?
I think public engagement works best when it is approached as a genuine dialogue, rather than as a one-way act of “translating” research for people outside academia. Of course, clarity matters enormously: as researchers, we have a responsibility to explain what we know, what we do not yet know, and why a particular question matters. But we also need to listen carefully to the questions, concerns and lived realities that patients and the public bring to the conversation.
This is especially important in mental health, where communication needs to be both accurate and thoughtful. There can be a temptation to present every finding as a breakthrough, or to simplify complex conditions into neat and appealing headlines. I think we should try to avoid that. The public deserves clarity, but also honesty about uncertainty, limitations, and the fact that people’s experiences do not always fit neatly within a single scientific account.
For me, one of the most important elements of meaningful patient and public engagement is approaching people’s stories with genuine interest. Sometimes, the most valuable moments are precisely those in which someone’s lived experience does not align with your hypothesis, your assumptions, or even a long-established theory. That can feel challenging and even a bit frustrating at first, but if you manage to transform that frustration into curiosity, those moments often offer the greatest margin for learning and intellectual growth.
Opportunities such as speaking on podcasts and being featured in The Telegraph have come from work grounded in this sincere commitment to public dialogue. A public lecture I gave during the 2024 Cambridge Science Festival on bridging lived experience and scientific enquiry opened conversations that reached beyond the university. Through the University media team, I was then invited by The Telegraph to speak about my story and my work at Cambridge.
To PhD students interested in contributing to the public discourse in their field, I would warmly recommend starting locally. Ask your department whether there are outreach opportunities you can support or lead. For those working in medical or health-related fields like me, joining a patient and public involvement group can be an excellent first step. I also think internet-based and social media platforms - especially LinkedIn - can be very useful spaces to practise communicating research in accessible language and explaining why it should matter beyond the scientific sector. Most importantly, I would encourage students to see public engagement not as an optional add-on to research, but as part of the responsibility and privilege of producing knowledge that may affect people’s lives.
I’m sure PhD students will find that particularly useful to kickstart their public engagement, so thank you.
Your public lecture series, The OCD Community Conversations, also sounds incredible! How did you set this up and how can people attend?
With The OCD Community Conversations, we wanted to create a space where scientific and lived-experience expertise could meet on equal terms, as two forms of knowledge that genuinely strengthen one another. After applying for, and securing, £20,000 in funding through Orchard OCD, we developed a six-lecture public series at the University of Cambridge focused on Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders (OCRDs), with each event bringing together professionals working at the forefront of the field with people who can speak to the realities of living with these conditions. I have been very fortunate to co-organise the series with my PhD colleague and friend Marina Rodriguez Lopez, whose support has been instrumental throughout. Thanks to her affiliation with St John’s College, we were also able to host all six events free of charge in the beautiful Old Divinity School, which has provided an exceptional setting for the conversations we wanted to create.
The aim is not simply to provide information, but to create an environment that encourages meaningful and constructive dialogue. The audience can hear directly from experts, ask questions, and engage with topics that are often misunderstood or avoided altogether. We want people with OCRDs and their families to leave with a greater sense of being seen, while also helping researchers and clinicians understand the human and societal consequences of the questions they study. The series is part of a wider commitment at Orchard OCD to make scientific research more open, accessible and accountable.
We are now halfway through the lecture series, and information about future events, attendance and any available recordings will be shared through Orchard OCD’s Eventbrite profile, social media and YouTube channels early this autumn. Each event is designed to welcome anyone with an interest in OCRDs: people with lived experience, family members, clinicians, scientists, students and members of the wider public. No background scientific knowledge is required to enjoy them.
I’m sure our readers will be very interested to attend the next events!
Which female-identifying people in your life inspire you, both in neuroscience and beyond?
In my experience so far, I’ve been very fortunate to learn from quite a few exceptional women, both within and outside the work environment, whose leadership is both intellectually formidable and deeply humane. In the interest of time, I’ll only mention two of them here.
Professor Amy Milton, my PhD supervisor at Cambridge, has been an especially important influence on me. Her leadership embodies a rare combination of scientific rigour, sharp intellect, and genuine empathy and kindness. She has shown me that it is possible to pursue ambitious, high-quality science while remaining deeply attentive to the people around you. To me, she represents the living proof that true success in academia does not require sacrificing kindness and compassion towards colleagues or supervisees: attention to people’s needs and hard work can co-exist, and that one can be both a brilliant, successful and highly engaged academic and a present, caring parent. She is an incredible mentor and woman, as well as a powerful example of the kind of scientist and leader I hope to become.
Beyond neuroscience, I am also deeply inspired by Inga Gruodis, who has now become one of my dearest friends. I first met Inga in December 2021, when I began working with her son James, then a four-year-old autistic boy who captured my heart in less than an hour. Since then, my relationship with James and his family - including Inga, James’s younger brother George, and his dad Vaidas - has grown into something truly meaningful to me. Over the years, I have had the privilege of getting to know Inga more closely, and I discovered a woman whose strength and resilience are genuinely extraordinary. What inspires me most is her capacity to meet life with extraordinary enthusiasm and determination, even in the most challenging circumstances: while holding a demanding senior operations role within one of the UK’s best-known retail businesses, she also navigates with immense love and courage the special needs of one of her children and the physical disability of the other. As I often say to her, she is my Wonder Woman.
What goals do you have for your career? Where do you see yourself in the next few years professionally?
My long-term ambition is to help shape the next phase of research into OCD and related conditions by contributing to a field that is better resourced, more interdisciplinary, and more closely aligned with the needs of the people it ultimately exists to serve. I am not entirely certain, yet, what form this will take after the end of my PhD, but I know that I want my career to sit at the interface between rigorous neuroscience, clinical relevance, lived-experience-informed research and public engagement.
Over the next year and a half, my immediate focus is on completing my PhD, publishing the work emerging from it, and developing the next stage of research on the intersection between biological vulnerability to OCD and the impact of traumatic life experiences. I’m especially interested in understanding what this interaction may mean, both biologically and cognitively, for the development of innovative, trauma-informed and more patient-tailored treatment approaches.
More broadly, I hope to contribute to building the kind of research infrastructure that OCD has historically lacked: one that supports ambitious science, brings together researchers across disciplines, collaborates with people with lived experience, and creates clearer pathways from discovery to clinical and societal impact.
And finally, congratulations on your win at the WiNUK awards event. How did you feel to receive the Rising Star Postgraduate Researcher of the Year award and how do you think the award will shape your work moving forward?
Receiving this award was genuinely humbling. I had not seen it coming, and being selected as a finalist among so many inspiring researchers had already filled me with gratitude and joy. So when I heard my name being called on stage for first prize, I felt completely overwhelmed in the best possible way.
For me, this award is not only about research. It is also about transforming years of terror, psychological isolation and uncertainty during my adolescence and early twenties into purpose. It is a reminder that even our hardest battles can, in time, become powerful drivers of change - for ourselves and, hopefully, for others.
Research can be a long and uncertain process, and much of the work that matters most - listening carefully to participants, revising a difficult manuscript, applying for funding, building partnerships, or trying again after rejection - often happens quietly and without recognition. That is why I still feel so incredibly honoured to have received the WiNUK Rising Star Award 2025. As I said at the awards reception, my heartfelt thanks continue to go to everyone who nominated me, to the WiNUK panel, and to the mentors, colleagues and collaborators whose support has been invaluable.
Beyond filling me with joy and gratitude, the award has also increased my sense of responsibility to use the opportunities it brings well: to keep pursuing ambitious research, to support other early-career researchers, and to help make space for people whose perspectives have historically been overlooked in mental-health science. It has given me confidence at a point in my career when confidence can sometimes be difficult to hold onto, and I hope it will help me continue to build a path that is scientifically demanding, collaborative and grounded in the belief that rigorous, patient-centred research can genuinely change lives.
I would also like to close by acknowledging that none of this work happens in isolation. I am so deeply grateful to the entire Orchard OCD team and wider research community, including - but not limited to - Dr Nick Sireau, Professor Trevor Robbins, Professor Naomi Fineberg, Pete Chan, Sean Fletcher, Dr Ilenia Pampaloni, Dr Lynne Drummond, Dr Chiara Toschi and Dr Himanshu Tyagi, for their intellectual generosity, for always believing in me and for placing their trust in me, even when the stakes were high. My heartfelt thanks also go to my PhD supervisor, Professor Amy Milton, for her exceptional guidance and support, and to my PhD colleagues and friends Marina Rodriguez Lopez, Charlotte Rye, Laetitia Ward, Dr Felippe Espinelli and Dr Shaira Berg, whose daily presence in the office, encouragement and friendship have meant - and still means - more to me than I usually tend to say.
This interview was conducted by Rebecca Pope, with graphics produced by Georgie Savastano and Rebecca Pope. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.
Comments