As a PGY-4 resident in the RCP, I worked with Roy Perlis, developing skills in risk prediction and machine learning using electronic health records. My plan is to go into child fellowship next year. My current projects all involve a dataset we’ve generated with all visits to our ED by children for psychiatric issues. There are a number of outcomes that are interesting to look at. Length of stay, hospitalization, repeat visits. The clinical experience working in APS really informs this work, and now when I get frustrated at how tough ED visits are for kids, I know that in my own way I’m doing something about it. This work has all been done with Roy and with Laura Prager.
Both research and clinical interests lie mostly in development of mood disorders across childhood and adolescence. Working with young adult patients has made me really interested in normal and abnormal patterns of mood regulation in this group. They seem to have a lot more variability, and also a lot more trouble describing it. With that interest in this age group, I’m acting as a senior resident with the transitional age youth and child eval rotation for PGY-3s. Its been great fun to get involved with administrative and education roles.
My research history is fairly varied. I started with EHR and risk prediction in the months before I started residency. My first research lab did postmortem brain work in suicide and mood disorders. Then I did a little bit of brain imaging and moved on to genetics. My PhD was training in Iceland in complex genetics. Then after finishing medical school I came to MGH for a post-doc in psychiatric genetics.
