Summary
Bruna Giribaldi (also Bruna Cunha) has been working as a Clinical Trial Manager at the Centres for Psychedelic Research and Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London since March 2017. Before then, she was an intern with the Psychedelic and Addictions teams from October 2015, under the guidance of Professor David Nutt, Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, Professor Anne Lingford-Hughes and Dr Louise Paterson. She has a 1st class hons. degree in Pharmacology from University College London.
She is currently setting up multiple studies at the new CNWL-Imperial Psychopharmacology and Psychedelic Research (CIPPRes clinic) under the guidance of Dr David Erritzoe:
1. PSILOCD: exploring the effects of psilocybin on obsessive-compulsive disorders
2. [11C]UCB-J PET-fMRI synaptogenesis study on healthy volunteers using Ketamine.
3. [11C]UCB-J PET-fMRI synaptogenesis study on healthy volunteers using N,N-DMT
She is also providing guidance on a psychedelic microdosing study at the CIPPRes clinic.
Before joining the CIPPRes clinic, she was the main study manager for the PSILODEP 2 study, a phase II, double-blind, randomised controlled trial comparing psilocybin and escitalopram in 59 patients with moderate-severe major depressive disorder, recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. She is still working on data management, analysis and publications for this study. She was featured in Times Magazine alongside Dr Carhart-Harris as part of an article on this research.
She has a particular interest in the effects of psychedelics on people's perceptions and experiences of sex and sexuality, and is currently working on a paper pooling data from several Imperial psychedelic studies and clinical trials. She gave a preliminary talk for Drug Science on this research.
As an intern, prior to managing the Psilodep study, she was involved in several projects within the Department of Psychiatry:
1. She was the Primary Data Manager for the first PSILODEP study, the phase I open-label feasibility study that informed the PSILODEP 2 study.
2. She analysed relapse incidence and associated predictors / correlates in the large CANTAB dataset of alcohol, cocaine and opiate addicts.
3. She collaborated with Dr Christopher Timmermann on a thematic analysis of participant's experiences of intravenous N,N-DMT in the first Imperial DMT study.
4. She collaborated with Dr Mendel Kaelen on a thematic analysis of interviews on participants' experiences of music and psychedelic therapy in the PSILODEP 1 study.