King's College London

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Reinders is a Senior Research Associate with Lecturer status at the Department of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King's College London (KCL). Dr Reinders is a leader in the field of pathological dissociation, having received multiple awards from the ISSTD for her work in this area, including a Mid Career Achievement Award in 2021. She is considered an international expert in the neurobiology of pathological dissociation as evidenced by invitations to deliver plenaries at international conferences. Dr Reinders was recently appointmented chair of the ENIGMA Dissociation Working Group. As chair she will lead an international team of researchers aiming to establish neuroimaging biomarkers for dissociation in a trans-diagnostic manner.

Chair ENIGMA-Dissociation Working Group:

http://enigma.ini.usc.edu/ongoing/enigma-dissociation-working-group/

Twitter: @AATSReinders

Website: www.neuroimaging-DID.com

RESEARCH

As part of her PhD Dr Reinders has worked on the Frontiers of Psychiatry and was among the first to publish on brain imaging in pathological dissociation. Her research was the first to show, on the basis of brain activation data, that different personality states in patients with dissociative identity disorder (DID) show different brain activation patterns in response to listening to trauma-related autobiographical texts. In an important follow-up study she showed that these personality-state-dependent brain activation patterns cannot be simulated. This research has been pivotal for the etiology discussion of DID and counters the view that DID is an iatrogenic disorder.

In a separate study Dr Reinders used structural data to show that DID and posttraumatic stress disorder share trauma-related neurostructural biomarkers. This work was the first to provide evidence that DID is related to early traumatization and is clinically relevant because it provides evidence for the DSM classification of DID. In a recent publication Dr Reinders showed how brain imaging can aid the diagnosis of DID using machine learning algorithms. This paper was awarded the 2020 Pierre Janet Writing Award of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD), which is given to an individual for the best clinical, theoretical or research paper in the field of dissociative and/or trauma within the past year. This award follows other awards such as the Morton Prince Award for Scientific Achievement (2017) of the ISSTD given for outstanding cumulative contributions to research in the area of dissociative disorders.