UCLA psychiatrist receives award for suicide prevention research

Dr. Juliet Beni Edgcomb, associate director of the Mental Health Informatics and Data Science Hub in the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA,was named the winner of the 2024 Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical Research by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Edgcomb, who is also an assistant professor-in-residence in the department of psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was recognized for her research into the development of set rules to clearly identify children and adolescents with suicide-related symptoms using electronic health record data.

The research translates methods from clinical research informatics to child mental health, a bridge made possible by collaboration with the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute's Biomedical Informatics Program and the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core.

Working with an electronic health record training set that included data from 400 children and adolescents, Edgcomb was able to identify those presenting to health care providers with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. She has expanded this research to develop and validate methods to detect suicide-related visits among 3,400 children.