Rate My Professor Cynthia Fu

Professor Cynthia Fu is Professor of Affective Neuroscience and Psychotherapy in the Centre for Affective Disorders, Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. She holds an MD and PhD, and serves as an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in the National Affective Disorders Tertiary Clinic and OPTIMA Bipolar Disorders Service at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Professor Fu is Programme Lead for the MSc in Clinical Psychotherapy, Section Editor for Brain Research Bulletin, and a member of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, Institute of Psychoanalysis, and British Psychoanalytical Society. She leads the COORDINATE-MDD consortium and conducts clinical trials on neuromodulation treatments integrating psychoanalytic perspectives with neuroscience.

Her research specializations include neuroimaging biomarkers for mood disorders such as major depressive disorder and bipolar depression, treatment prediction using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and neuromodulation therapies like transcranial direct current stimulation. Professor Fu pioneered demonstrations that neural activation patterns during processing of sad faces diagnose depression and that brain responses and morphological changes predict treatment response. With 12,488 citations, her publications rank in the top decile for influence in psychiatry. Key publications are 'Home-based transcranial direct current stimulation treatment for major depressive disorder: a fully remote phase 2 randomized sham-controlled trial' (Nature Medicine, 2024), 'Neuroanatomical dimensions in medication-free individuals with major depressive disorder and treatment response to SSRI antidepressant medications or placebo' (Nature Mental Health, 2024), 'Neuroanatomical dimensions in major depression linked to cognition, adverse life events, self-harm, metabolomics and genetics' (Communications Medicine, 2025), 'Enhanced network synchronization connectivity following transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in bipolar depression' (Journal of Affective Disorders, 2025), and 'Home-based transcranial direct current stimulation in bipolar depression: an open-label treatment study' (International Journal of Bipolar Disorders, 2024). She has received the British Association for Psychopharmacology Award, two Young Investigator Awards from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2002, 2006), and funding from NIHR, NIMH, MRC, Wellcome Trust, Rosetrees Trust, Baszucki Brain Research Milken Institute, and others.