Sarah Goodday

My primary focus in the department is coordinating efforts in the further development and expansion of the True Colours symptom monitoring platform - a digital remote capture system for research and clinical service and in the development of a True Colours Research database. 

My main areas of expertise is in stress, and bio-psychosocial risk factors for the early development of mood disorders and suicide-related behaviours. My current work centers on the prevention and early intervention 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 in 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 funded by the Department's MRC Pathfinder Award and now work as a senior research scientist with 4YouandMe - a non-profit dedicated to research into the feasibility of digital tools to detect and track stress and symptoms of disease to return agency back to individuals.