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CAMHS Digital Lab 2024: The year in review

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20/01/25

We reflect on a year of growth, change, publications, and collaboration.

It was a busy year for the CAMHS Digital Lab. As we reflect on the past year of growth and change, we'd like to take this opportunity to thank not only our team, but also all our partners across King’s College London, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, and beyond. Read on to find out more about what we got up to last year.


Hello, goodbye

To start with the personal, we have gained a few new faces, while saying goodbye to others. We have had five new PhDs and one Clinical Fellowship start with us this year: Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Trainees Dr. Shuo Zhang, Dr. Laurence Telesia, and Dr. Asilay Seker all began PhDs with us this year. Child and Adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Po-Chang Tseng also started his PhD studies with us, as did Dr. Hissah Al Abdulsalam, while Dr. Nessma Abdelhafez began a Clinical Research Training Fellowship with us. You can find out more about these PhDs here and here. Cato Zantmann, Will Bennett, and Dan Smith also joined the team.


But we have also said goodbye to a colleague or two. At the beginning of the year, we congratulated Senta Häussler as she started a PhD next door at the Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre on the genetic and environmental risk factors which predict long-term outcomes amongst those experiencing their first episode of psychosis. We have also said a temporary goodbye to Sophie Epstein while she is on maternity leave, and who will also be starting a new position when she returns next year as a Clinical Lecturer at Bristol University. These aren’t really farewells; both Senta and Sophie are continuing to work with us. And with the Lab, much like the Eagles’ famous Hotel: you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!


Engagement

The Lab has travelled far and wide this year to present our work at conferences. Our Programme Manager Jess Penhallow went to Ireland to give a talk on myHealthE at the ISRII, while PhD candidate Brian Ching presented his work on the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and young people’s mental health at the IoPPN’s Great Minds Lecture Series as well as at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Budapest. Slightly less far afield, Academic Lead Dr. Alice Wickersham and Zoë Firth gave a talk on our ‘Five Minute Speech Sample’ project at the CLOSER conference in London, while Dr. Shuo Zhang spoke at a symposium at the American Psychosomatic Society conference on the relationship between climate and mental health.


We’re particularly proud of our cross-disciplinary engagement this year outside the academic sector. We’ve showcased our research at events with a variety of our partners: from presenting to clinicians and young people at the SLaM CAMHS Project Showcase and our work with schools at the King’s Health Partners Annual Conference and the School Mental Health Innovation Network, to a local Town Hall in Lambeth where Dr. Shuo Zhang participated in a panel on CAMHS design. Working with de-identified records from healthcare, criminal justice, and education, our Academic Lead Dr. Alice Wickersham’s work is inherently multidisciplinary. As such, she has presented this work at a variety of cross-disciplinary events this year, including events for Department for Education, the Oxford Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Seminar Series, and a workshop at the City University of London. Finally, Dr. Laurence Telesia gave a talk at the Royal Society of Medicine entitled ‘Psychiatry as a Career: All you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask’.


We’re glad our work is reaching beyond our academic colleagues, and look forward to another year ahead of working with professionals from a variety of sectors to create meaningful change for children and young people’s mental health.


Papers

We’re delighted that our PhD student Anna Morris and team published their FREDY framework (Framework for Remotely Enabled co-Design with Young people) in Frontiers in Psychiatry. Through this work, they co-designed wearable devices with and for neurodivergent young people online during the first year of COVID-19 lockdowns. Studies of electronic healthcare records and their linkages with other datasets led by our Academic Lead Alice Wickersham were published in the Journal of European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and BMJ Open. Our PhD student Brian Ching published a comment piece in Nature Mental Health on the research priorities for the relationship between young people’s mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the topic of his PhD. Finally, some of our engagement work for our project building automated tools to analyse parents’ speech data from the E-Risk longitudinal twin cohort study was published in an editorial in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. The results of our pilot work on these automated methods also got published in PLoS ONE.

You can read more papers that members of the Lab were involved in this year in the links below:


Prizes

Finally, it ain’t all about the prizes – but they can be nice just the same. 2024 was a fortuitous year for the Lab, with members of the Lab, its projects, and wider team getting acknowledgements from a broad range of societies and competitions. Read our news story here to find out more about what the Lab won last year.

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