Professional background
Dr Adams trained in medicine and neuroscience at Cambridge University, and completed his clinical training at University College London.
Dr Adams has been a consultant general adult psychiatrist since 2017, and has worked as a doctor in the NHS since 2004. He has worked in a range of NHS services, including outpatient and inpatient general adult psychiatry, neurodevelopmental disorders, neuropsychiatry, older adult psychiatry and forensic psychiatry.
He has specialist clinical (and research) interests in psychosis and neuropsychiatry, and has a weekly clinic in the Camden Early Intervention in Psychosis NHS service, where he is responsible for the diagnosis and treatment of young people with possible psychotic disorders.
He also works in a clinic in the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, a tertiary referral centre for neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g. complex neurodevelopmental disorders, rare causes of psychosis, mood disorders in the context of neurological conditions, and functional neurological symptoms).
He has membership of both the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal College of Physicians, meaning he has both psychiatric and also general medical expertise. He is an approved clinician under section 12 of the Mental Health Act.
Research interests
Dr Adams obtained a PhD in the use of computational models to understand the neurobiology of psychosis and functional symptoms in 2014, from UCL. He has been active in research at UCL since then, publishing over 55 research papers and 7 book chapters, and is currently a future leaders fellow.
His laboratory focuses on using computational models of both mental symptoms and brain imaging data to understand the cognitive processes underlying those symptoms, and the altered neurobiology underlying changes in brain imaging data, in mental health disorders. The aim of this approach is to develop new treatments and diagnostic methods for psychiatry.
Publications
For a full list please see https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=dAi_S_MAAAAJ&hl=en
Hauke DJ, Roth V, Karvelis P, Adams RA, Moritz S, Borgwardt S, Diaconescu AO, Andreou C (2022): Increased belief instability in psychotic disorders predicts treatment response to metacognitive training. Schiz Bull (in press)
Adams RA, Pinotsis D, Tsirlis K, …, Murray JD, Friston KJ, Hong E, Anticevic A (2022): Computational modelling of EEG and fMRI paradigms reveals a consistent loss of pyramidal cell synaptic gain in schizophrenia. Biol Psychiatry 91:202-15.
Adams RA*, Vincent P*, Benrimoh D, Friston KJ, Parr T (2021): Everything is connected: Inference and attractors in delusions. Schizophr Res (in press)
Howes OD, Hird EJ, Adams RA, Corlett PR, McGuire P (2020): Aberrant salience, information processing and dopaminergic signalling in people at clinical risk for psychosis. Biol Psychiatry 88:304-14.
Mihalik A*, Adams RA*, Huys QJM (2020): Canonical correlation analysis for identifying biotypes of depression. Biol Psychiatry CNNI 5:478-80.
Fradkin I, Adams RA, Parr T, Roiser JP, Huppert JD (2020): Searching for an anchor in an unpredictable world: A computational model of obsessive compulsive disorder. Psychol Rev 127:672-99.
Adams RA*, Bush D*, Zheng F*, Meyer SM, Kaplan R, Orfanos S, Marques TR, Howes OD, Burgess N (2020): Impaired theta phase coupling underlies frontotemporal dysconnectivity in schizophrenia. Brain 143:1261-77.
Adams RA, Moutoussis M, … Friston KJ, Howes OD, Roiser JP (2020): Variability in action selection relates to striatal dopamine 2/3 receptor availability in humans: a PET study of reinforcement learning and active inference. Cereb Cortex 30:3573-89.
Zarkali A, Adams RA, Psarras S, Leyland L-A, Rees G, Weil RS (2019): Increased weighting on prior knowledge in Lewy Body-associated visual hallucinations. Brain Comms 1:fcz007.
Adams RA*, Napier G*, Roiser JP, Mathys C, Gilleen J (2018): Attractor-like dynamics in belief updating in schizophrenia. J Neurosci 38:9471-85.
Sterzer P, Adams RA, Fletcher P, Frith C, …, Uhlhaas P, Voss M, Corlett PR (2018): The predictive-coding account of psychosis. Biol Psychiatry 84:634-43.
Adams RA, Huys QJM, Roiser JP (2016): Computational Psychiatry – towards a mathematically informed understanding of mental illness. JNNP 87:53-63.
Pareés I, Brown HR, Nuruki A, Adams RA, Davare M, Bhatia KP, Friston KJ, Edwards MJ (2014): Loss of sensory attenuation in patients with functional (psychogenic) movement disorders. Brain 137:2916-21.
Adams RA, Stephan KE, Brown HR, Frith CD, Friston KJ (2013): The computational anatomy of psychosis. Front Psychiatry 4:47.
Edwards MJ*, Adams RA*, Brown H, Pareés I, Friston KJ (2012): A Bayesian account of ‘hysteria’. Brain 135:3495-512.