Shiqi LuPhD Student Email: s.lu@qmul.ac.ukProfileProfileProject Title: Towards early identification and prevention of depression and suicidality in young people. Summary: Depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviours in young people are growing public health concerns worldwide, posing a significant cost on families and society. Risk for these mental health issues is particularly high for young people with neurodevelopmental conditions, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Understanding the processes underlying the increased risk for depression in young people with and without ADHD holds great potential for developing tools to predict and prevent these devastating mental health outcomes. Yet, previous efforts to identify at-risk adolescents have yielded limited success. Since depression and suicidality have both biological and psychosocial underpinnings, combining information from biological and psychosocial risk factors may be crucial to improve identification of adolescents at highest risk and their long-term mental health outcomes. The overall goal of my PhD project is to examine the risk pathways leading to increased depression and suicidality among youth from the general population and youth with ADHD. Specifically, I will integrate information from psychosocial risk factors with biological risk factors derived from non-invasive and clinically-translatable EEG recordings of brain activity. In order to study a wide range of psychosocial and biological risk factors and their effect on the emergence of depression and suicidality longitudinally, I will leverage existing data from two large and deeply-phenotyped samples of adolescents that were followed up into young adulthood. Supervisor: Dr Giorgia Michelini Research