PhD Recipient: Alexander Campbell, Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Melbourne
Supervisors: Dr Lucas Calais Ferreira, A/Prof Shuai Li, Dr Ye Tian, Prof Alina Rodriguez, Dr Hong Pan.
Funding: $10,000 in GERA’s PhD Top Up Scholarship Round 2 (2026)
About the project: This project aims to identify biological markers of psychological resilience to comorbid anxiety and depression in adolescents. Using the GUSTO Singaporean birth cohort (around 1,200 mother–child pairs), it will integrate different biomarker domains with culturally validated measures of resilience (Singapore Youth Resilience Scale). Our analyses will examine how early-life biological profiles and their changes over time relate to resilient versus non-resilient outcomes in adolescence, including gene–environment interactions and mediation pathways. The work is methodologically innovative in treating resilience as a distinct, measurable construct within a life-course genetic epidemiology framework, and will be supported by a 12‑month placement at A*STAR providing advanced multiomic training and a cross-institutional supervisory team in Melbourne and Singapore.
Go to: