Sarah Goodday

I am a social, psychiatric and digital epidemiologist and am currently, Lead Scientist at 4YouandMe, a non-profit that conducts open-source research into the prevention and early intervention applications of remote digital health technologies including smartphones and wearable devices. 

My scope of work centres on stress and other bio-psychosocial risk factors as prevention and early intervention targets of mental and physical health outcomes during life transitional periods including the perinatal window, adolescence, emerging adulthood, and menopause. My approach uses digital phenotyping and participant co-created research, involving multiple digital tools (e.g., smart devices and apps) to capture high-resolution manifestations of stress and chronic conditions to inform individual level trajectories of experience with an aim to inform individualized interventions.

I completed a Bachelor of Science degree with an Honours in Psychology followed by a Master’s degree in Community Health and Epidemiology from Dalhousie University. I then completed a PhD in Epidemiology at the University of Toronto at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. During these graduate degrees, I additionally worked as a research associate with the Flourish Canadian Bipolar High-risk Offspring Study aimed at describing the early clinical and psycho-social trajectory of bipolar disorder among offspring at genetic risk. Following my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in bioinformatics in the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford. 

Currently, I co-lead a number of digital health research projects that leverage high-resolution, multimodal digital data centred on quantifying real-world individual level stress and on defining symptom trajectories within and across mental health conditions, and transitional periods in women's health such as pregnancy. All of these studies include an element of participant co-design that aims to break down barriers in the endemic engagement challenge in the use of digital health technologies for long term, health monitoring and provision of care.