Rate My Professor Shabah Shadli

Dr. Shabah Shadli served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology, Division of Sciences, at the University of Otago from 2015 to 2022. She completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Otago in 2015 under the supervision of Professor Neil McNaughton. Her doctoral thesis, titled "An improved human anxiety-specific biomarker: Frequency band, modality specificity, personality, pharmacology, and source characterisation," developed the first biomarker for any anxiety disorder and an improved version suitable for clinical use, employing EEG, source localization (sLORETA), and pharmacological interventions. Prior to her postdoctoral role, Shadli was a research associate in the same department from 2013 to 2014. Her work at Otago was supported by the University of Otago Doctoral Scholarship and project grants from the Health Research Council of New Zealand.

Shadli's research specializations include cognitive neuropsychology, with a focus on the pathophysiology of anxiety and depressive disorders, their comorbidity, and novel treatments such as off-label ketamine for treatment-resistant cases. She utilizes EEG, fMRI, and blood samples to identify response biomarkers for ketamine's mechanism of action. Key publications during her Otago tenure include "Ketamine Effects on EEG during Therapy of Treatment-Resistant Generalised Anxiety and Social Anxiety" (International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2018), "Generalisation from an auditory to a visual stimulus" (Biological Psychology, 2016), "Frontal localisation of a theory-based anxiety disorder biomarker" (Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 2015), "Trait depressivity prediction with EEG signals via LSBoost" (2021), "Right Frontal Theta: Is It a Response Biomarker for Antidepressants?" (Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2022), "Ketamine for treatment-resistant major depressive disorder" (Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2024), "Ketamine for treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder: Double-blind active-controlled randomised crossover study" (2024), "Ketamine for treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder" (BJPsych Open, 2025), and "Six weeks open-label oral ketamine for patients with treatment-resistant anxiety disorders" (2025). She presented on right frontal anxiolytic-sensitive EEG theta rhythm in the stop-signal task at the 258th Otago Medical School Research Society meeting in 2021, collaborating with departments of Psychological Medicine and Psychology.