Dr. Jessica Eccles is a researcher at the department of Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the United Kingdom. Her areas of expertise include brain-body interactions, joint hypermobility, liaison psychiatry, and neurodevelopmental conditions.

Dr. Eccles trained in medicine at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, which sparked a keen interest in philosophy and brain-body interactions. She completed her PhD in the relationship between joint hypermobility, autonomic dysfunction, and psychiatric symptoms. She is a recognized expert in brain-body medicine and a researcher and educator, and is chair of the Neurodevelopmental Psychiatry Special Interest Group at The Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Dr. Eccles and her team have published papers on the brain-body interactions between neurodivergence, emotion regulation and proprioception (the body’s ability to sense its own position and movements without having to rely on visual input alone), and the role of neurodivergence and inflammation on chronic fatigue in adolescents.

Dr Eccles also led a study which found that neurodivergent people are more than twice as likely as the general population to have hypermobile joints and are far more likely to experience pain on a regular basis.

In 2024, Dr. Eccles was the winner of the Research Pioneer Award conferred by The Ehlers Danlos Society for her hypermobility research.