Jingchu Hu is a research associate and psychotherapist at the Shenzhen Mental Health Center (Shenzhen Kangning Hospital, The Affiliated Mental Health Center, Southern University of Science and Technology). Jingchu completed her PhD study in clinical psychology at the School of Psychology of South China Normal University and the Department of Psychiatry of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, supervised by Professor Daniela Schiller. She quited her second PhD study in medical science at the Faculty of Medicine of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and declined the post-doctoral research fellow offer at the Medicine School of Yale University (due to the covid-19 outbreak).
In 2020,Jingchu was recognized as a high-level talent by the Shenzhen Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau.Until 2024,she has received 7 research project grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation,the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation, and the Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Committee et al. The total amount of approved funding received by Jingchu exceeds 1.3 million RMB.
Jingchu also holds the National Level 2 Psychological Counselor Certificate certified by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security of China and the Intermediate Psychotherapist Certificate certified by the National Health Commission of China, and provides psychotherapy services to inpatients at Shenzhen Kangning Hospital, trying to understand mental health in clinical practice as well.
Jingchu’s research focuses on the pathological psychological and neurological mechanisms of anxiety, fear, and traumatic memories, with the aim of improving the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Using psychological experiments, brain imaging, non-invasive brain stimulation, and computational modeling, Jingchu develops novel interventions based on memory reconsolidation mechanisms for MDD and PTSD. The research also investigates neurocomputational mechanisms in anxiety and depressive disorders using a variety of psychological and decision-making tasks. The lab’s projects include assessing the efficacy and neural mechanisms of reconsolidation-based cognitive reappraisal for traumatic memories in depression, evaluating its long-term effects and clinical application, and exploring the abnormal behavioral and neural patterns of aversive reversal in anxiety disorders. Another project examines public mental health, particularly for Covid-19 related mental health outcomes and minority groups’s mental health.