Dr Kate Fairweather

Research area and interests:

My research has a broad scope, but the uniting elements typically revolving around Mental Health and Wellbeing.

My expertise is essentially in psychiatric epidemiology, and generally focuses on the following topic domains:

• Transdiagnostic models of health. It is relatively common for people with one illness to have another, concurrently (comorbidity).
• Epidemiological risk factor models addressing diseases and disorders
• Social psychological models of health cognition and behaviour (and behaviour change)
  
• Genetic and environmental influences on health outcomes, and the impact these interactions (Biometric Twin studies)
• Health translation research
• Interdisciplinary research

Specific disorders/conditions of interest:

• Suicidality
• Anxiety disorders
• Eating disorders
• Borderline personality disorder
• Smoking and other drug use
• Comorbidities among disorders

Methods: I am interested in both the strategic identification of data, which, through collaborative team formation, can enable investigation of an extensive range of factors related to an outcome of interest. These data may be analysed independently, or combined through data ‘harmonisation’ to ‘value-add’ a meta-dataset.

Intervention-oriented designs - such as randomised control trials

Further, in addition to my interest in more standard epidemiological designs and intervention approaches, I am keen to collaborate with researchers and students interested to investigate twins' data using biometric twin modelling. Prior knowledge of R and/or Stata programs would be useful, but not essential.