Dr. Emma Morton awarded fellowship from Marshall Scholars and Fellows Program

We are delighted to share that network member Emma Morton has been awarded a fellowship through the Institute of Mental Health and the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia’s Marshall Scholars and Fellows Program in Mental Health. The program supports the Department of Psychiatry at UBC’s aim to foster outstanding research, by supporting training of promising young investigators in transitional research who will contribute to advancing understanding and treatment of psychiatric disorders. Successful candidates were selected following a peer-review process involving the contributions of 20 academics from universities across North America with expertise across diverse fields of mental health and basic neuroscience.

The aim of Dr. Morton’s fellowship research program is to advance the science of quality of life (QoL) in people with mood disorders by analysing large scale clinical trials and longitudinal datasets and contributing to the development of a new intervention targeting QoL. QoL is a treatment outcome prioritised by people with mood disorders, but the construct, its predictors, and optimal ways to improve it are not well understood. Sophisticated path analysis techniques will be used to analyse datasets, including the LIFE-D study of light treatment and fluoxetine in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), the CAN-BIND study of biomarkers and clinical predictors of response to treatment in MDD, and the STOP-EM longitudinal study of CANMAT guideline-driven treatment for first episode mania. Finally, Dr. Morton will also contribute to the development of a new mobile phone app to improve quality of life in people with bipolar disorder, Bipolar Bridges.

Emma will be leaving Australia to join the CREST.BD team at the University of British Columbia, and is looking forward to exploring beautiful Vancouver. You can read about Emma’s research here or follow her on Twitter: @morton_emm