Professor Ian Kelleher (Academy of Medical Sciences Professorship)

Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Background

I am Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh and a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist working in specialist CAMHS. My research interests are in the prediction and prevention of serious mental illness. I lead an interdisciplinary research team that takes a data-driven approach to identifying individuals at risk of psychosis and bipolar disorder, as well as research on psychotic and attenuated psychotic symptoms in clinical and non-clinical populations.

We use a range of methodologies, including large-scale epidemiological analyses, predictive modelling, and causal inference methods to assess treatment effects. The ultimate goal of this research is to improve early identification of risk for major mental illness, to reduce duration of untreated illness, and to identify effective preventive interventions.

My plans for Edinburgh are to harness the outstanding data assets here in order to expand our data-driven research on the prediction and prevention of serious mental illness and, more generally, to use these findings to help develop world-leading, evidence-based specialist mental health services for children and adolescents. I’m on the lookout for postdoc researchers and PhD students to join my team – people with epidemiology/data science/quantitative stats skills who are interested in applied epidemiology and youth mental health.

Affiliated research centres