Dr Jessica Fritz

BSc MSc PhD

Position Fellow Junior Research Fellow
Subject areas Psychology Psychiatry
School Clinical Medicine
Personal website Jessica-fritz.com
Department Department of Psychiatry
Email jf585@cam.ac.uk
Twitter @Jessica_Fritz92

Jessica is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry.

Jessica conducted her BSc in Psychology and her Research MSc in Clinical and Health Psychology at Leiden University, in the Netherlands (2011-2016). She completed her PhD in Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge (2020). Since September 2020, Jessica is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychiatry and works together with Professor Tamsin Ford. Jessica also lectures and supervises for the Department of Psychology; specifically, for the Risk and Resilience Module of Psychological and Behavioural Sciences – 6, a course coordinated by Professor Claire Hughes.

Jessica’s research aims to identify and examine psychosocial factors that mitigate (the development of) mental health problems across the lifecourse, factors such as self-esteem or distress tolerance. Her research focusses both on population representative groups of people, as well as specifically on those people with a history of adverse experiences (i.e. traumatic events [e.g. a severe car crash] or severely stressful series of events [e.g. repeatedly witnessing intimate partner violence]). Knowledge about psychosocial factors can inform translational research on screening, prevention and treatment of mental health problems, and may thereby eventually aid mental health promotion. A more recent component of Jessica’s research is to investigate the promotive effect of psychosocial factors during the stress- and often isolation-inducing COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, another area of her research focusses on the overlap and comorbidity between physical and mental health problems. Jessica’s research has in the past predominantly been supported by the Medical Research Council and is currently mainly supported by the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.