Sarah Goodday

I’m a postdoctoral researcher working with the bioinformatics team at the Department of Psychiatry. My primary focus is on the MRC funded Mental Health Data Pathfinder project aimed at establishing a mental health data platform across the UK. My current projects involve establishing utility of existing data available through CRIS-Oxford and exploration of potential linkage of secondary mental health care data with other data sources to enrich research, particularly in adolescent mental health. I’m also exploring the utility of natural language processing of medical records care notes and applications of machine learning approaches for risk prediction.

My main areas of research interest have involved the study of perinatal and childhood factors suitable as potential preventive targets for adolescent mental health outcomes across high-risk and general population samples.

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. My PhD dissertation focused on the epidemiology of self-reported suicide-related thoughts and behavior in the Canadian population, exploring new applications of counting process time-to-event models for incidence calculation. I also examined the effects of childhood family and psycho-social predictors of suicide-related behavior in Canadian adolescents using national survey data. 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.