Speaker
Alex Kwong
Wellcome Senior Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh
Biography
I am a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow at the Division of Psychiatry, Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences.
I completed my PhD in Advanced Quantitative Methods at the University of Bristol in 2019. I joined Psychiatry as a Research Fellow shortly after, working under Professor Andrew McIntosh to examine the genomics of depression. I was awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2020 examining bio-psycho-social mechanisms underpinning adolescent depression & then awarded two Wellcome Mental Health Data Prizes to develop a digital tool for examining trajectories of mental health across development.
I am predominantly interested in examining the causes and consequences of poorer mental health in young people. My research group uses longitudinal data through the lens of epidemiology, genomics, data science and social science to probe this. We are also interested in developing methods that can facilitate better understanding of the course of mental health problems.
In 2024, I started a 5-year Wellcome Early Career Award that combines these research interests above and joined the Edinburgh Scientific Academic Track (ESAT) scheme, which is a tenure track scheme for early career scientists at Edinburgh.