PhD Candidaties for "WARN-D: Building a personalized early warning system for depression"

The Clinical Psychology department at the Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Social and behavioural Sciences has a vacancy for two PhD candidaties for "WARN-D: Building a personalized early warning system for depression".

This recently funded five-year ERC Project has the goal to build the early warning system WARN-D to reliably predict depression in young adults before it occurs. We will follow 2,000 young adults over two years, and integrate emerging theoretical, measurement, and modelling approaches from different scientific fields. Depression will be conceptualized as a complex, dynamical, biopsychosocial system in which causal relations between a host of variables can move the system from a healthy to a clinical state, consistent with the Network Approach to Psychopathology that Dr. Fried co-developed. In addition to traditional mental health surveys every few months, we will assess how young adults are doing in their daily lives for three months, collecting smart-phone based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data and smart-watch based digital phenotype data. This will provide insights into temporal patterns of mood, symptoms, sleep, and activity. Dynamical network models will be used to study the within-person mood systems, and machine learning models to build WARN-D. The team for this project will consist of the two PhD positions announced here; a postdoctoral researcher who will focus on building WARN-D; bachelor and master students; and Eiko Fried.