Youth Mental Health Research — SickKids (Korczak Lab)

As a Clinical Research Project Assistant in Dr. Daphne Korczak's lab at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), I worked on studies of depression and suicide risk in young people — the closest, most direct research I've done to the lived experience of a mental-health crisis.

Much of my role was assessment. I conducted structured psychiatric interviews using validated instruments — the K-SADS-DEP, the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), and the Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Interview (SITBI) — with adolescents presenting with suicidal ideation or depression.

I also contributed to a large-scale survey study on youth mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, managing quantitative data in REDCap. I independently developed an updated framework for measuring gender and sex in the research, and co-authored a peer-reviewed paper on gender-specific adolescent suicide-risk presentations to the emergency department during the pandemic (Gingoyon et al., 2024).

Methods & skills: structured psychiatric assessment (K-SADS-DEP, C-SSRS, SITBI) · crisis-sensitive clinical interviewing · research ethics and participant-safety protocols · quantitative data management (REDCap) · independent measurement framework design · peer-reviewed co-authorship.