Dr Emilia Molimpakis

Emilia is a Neuroscientist and Linguist with a PhD and post-doc from UCL. She has been named one of the top mental health scientists globally and has won UKRI Innovation Awards. Prior to co-founding thymia, she worked for over a decade as a researcher with patient populations – from Alzheimer’s Disease through to schizophrenia and depression – using language as biomarker for cognitive decline and treatment response. She also worked with a gaming company helping them design video games based on Neuropsychology.

During her PhD, however, she witnessed a close friend develop depression and fall through the cracks in the healthcare system until it was too late. Emilia could not understand how psychiatrists missed the severity of her friend’s condition, but upon delving deeper into the psychiatric system in the UK and abroad, she realised that clinicians were using the same subjective questionnaires they had been using since World War I. None of the recent scientific advances she had been seeing and contributing towards were being used in the industry. So she quit her postdoc in order to bring all of her knowledge to clinical practice, to help clinicians by offering them much more objective measures of mental illness through digital biomarkers. She joined Entrepreneur First to find a co-founder who could help her realise her idea for thymia and that is where she met Stefano, a perfect match.