Academic interests & PhD project
I am interested in the domain of clinical psychology, the prevention of suicide and self-harm behaviour and identification of risk groups along with factors which may be protective to those groups. User involvement is an important part of the CHARM project and along with person-centeredness a key focus in my research.
Apart from self-harm und suicide prevention, I am also interested in the psychosocial impact of somatic diseases as well as diversity, health care, social aspects of mental health and the impact of politics and social structures on mental health care.
In my PhD project, CHARM, I am studying the aetiology of childhood self-harm in the general population, using an epidemiological approach. The objectives of the project are to characterize childhood self-harm, identification of risk and protective factors for the occurrence of self-harm in childhood and the fostering of resilience in children. The project uses data from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), as well as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), an UK-based cohort study. To analyze the cohort data from the ALSPAC study, I am currently (2024) visiting the Centre for Academic Mental Health (CAHM), the School of Psychological Science & the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol, UK.
Background
I hold a Master of Science degree in Psychology from the University of Siegen, Germany. From 2016 to 2022, I worked as a research assistant at the Medical Center Hamburg, Institute and Outpatients Clinic Medical Psychology and was member of the research groups 'Patient-centered care: evaluation and implementation' and 'Patient-centered health-care and e-health'. In 2021 - 2022, I was a research trainee, funded by the Erasmus+ grant, at the Institute of Basic Medical Science, Medical Faculty of the University of Oslo where I also wrote my master thesis on fear of cancer recurrence in childhood cancer survivors, supervised by Hanne C. Lie. In the summer of 2022, I started my PhD on early childhood and adolescent self-harm at the Nic Waals Institute, Lovisenberg Diakonal Hospital.
