PhD Scholarship - PRE-EMPT

PhD Scholarship - PRE-EMPT

An exciting  position is available for a PhD candidate working within  PRE-EMPT: Prediction of Early Mental Disorder and Preventive Treatment - Centre of Research Excellence.

The overall goals of PRE-EMPT are to:

  1. Examine how mental illnesses develop and identify risk and protective factors for the development of these illnesses
  2. Improve our ability to predict clinical outcomes of mental illnesses and
  3. Create clinical tools to improve and individualise treatments for young people experiencing mental illness

Although flexible, the focus of this PhD position is likely to be the prediction of suicidal behaviour.

Suicide is the leading cause of death among people aged 15-44 in Australia, with rates of suicide attempts continuing to rise.
Currently, no risk factor predicts future suicidal behaviour better than chance.
There is therefore a clear need to develop predictive algorithms for risk of future suicide attempts that can be used in clinical practice.

Data from different projects and consortia will be used in this project to better understand and predict future suicidal behaviour, for example multimodal data gathered through the ENIGMA Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviours (STB) consortium (>26,000 cases), data in the Early Genetics and Lifecourse Epidemiology (EAGLE) consortium with longitudinal data on 100,000 children from the general population or electronic health record data from children and adolescents presenting at child and youth mental health services.

This PhD position will be based in the Centre of Youth Mental Health, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Melbourne. Supervision will be joined with the Child Health Research Centre, University of Queensland with the possibility to do a secondment in Brisbane.

Ideally, the candidate will have strong statistical skills and some programming experience.
It is essential that applicants meet the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and  Health Science’s requirements for Graduate Research candidature.

Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences PhD course information: http://mdhs-study.unimelb.edu.au/degrees

For more info, please contact Prof Barnaby Nelson.