I am Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh and an honorary Consultant Psychiatrist working in CAMHS. My research interests are in the prediction and prevention of serious mental illness – the key question being: can we identify (and reduce) risk  in childhood? I lead an interdisciplinary research team that takes a data-driven approach to identifying individuals at risk of schizophrenia-spectrum and bipolar disorders, as well as research on psychotic and attenuated psychotic symptoms in clinical and non-clinical populations. We use a range of methodologies, including large-scale epidemiological analyses, predictive modelling, and causal inference methods to assess treatment effects. The ultimate goal of this research is to improve early identification of risk for major mental illness, to reduce duration of untreated illness, and to identify effective preventive interventions.

My plans for Edinburgh are to harness the outstanding data assets here in order to expand our data-driven research on the prediction and prevention of serious mental illness and, more generally, to use these findings to help develop world-leading, evidence-based specialist mental health services for children and adolescents. I’m on the lookout for postdoc researchers and PhD students to join my team – people with epidemiology/data science/quantitative stats skills who are interested in applied epidemiology and youth mental health.