News — NOVEMBER 21, 2024 - NEW YORK, NY—Today, the MQ Foundation (MQF) announced its inaugural U.S. Fellow awards. The MQF award is $375,000 and Fellows receive mentorship and access to experts and those with lived experience to advance their investigations on suicidality, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. All three awardees are in postdoctoral programs at Yale University and received the highest scores among dozens of applications. Fellows’ research will commence in Winter 2025.
MQF Fellows Awards are highly prestigious and unique as they offer early-career researchers the resources they need to pursue innovative research approaches that will contribute to transformative advances in mental health conditions’ prevention, diagnosis and treatment. The multi-stage selection process involved rigorous application review by staff, MQF’s Research Committee and external peer reviewers, as well as input from the Lived Experience Expert Network. By supporting post-doctoral scientists, MQ Foundation is retaining talent in the field for significant breakthroughs and increasing the diversity of professionals, disciplines and approaches to researching mental health conditions.
The 2024 US Fellows will address critical mental health needs, with a focus on youth: In 2023, 12.3% of adolescents, or 3.2 million, had past-year serious thoughts of suicide. From 2016 to 2020, children and adolescents had significant increases in anxiety (7% to 9%).
“Today, we are facing incredible mental health challenges, and we must provide better treatment and resources,” said Ann Richman, Executive Director of MQF. “MQF’s mission to help close the gap in access to funding and mentorship for mental health research is propelling a new generation of talent like our 2024 Fellows. They are innovative experts seeking to leverage new technologies, such as machine-learning, and their own unique subject area knowledge to provide scalable and durable solutions for our youth, their families and society.”
MQF seeks to fund a diverse research portfolio that reflects a bio-psycho-social approach to mental health. The 2024 MQF Fellows Awards were open to early career researchers anywhere in the United States and from all disciplines related to mental health research. Research could
be based in the laboratory, clinic or field and involve theoretical, experimental, social science or medical humanities approaches.
Dr. Brenda Cabrera-Mendoza
Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale School of Medicine
Project: Understanding and Predicting Suicide Risk Using Genetics and Health History Suicidal behaviors are leading causes of death and disability, causing significant emotional and financial burdens on patients, families and society. These behaviors have been on the rise over the past ten years, with an even greater increase after the COVID-19 pandemic. To effectively reduce the rates of suicidal behaviors, it is important to identify individuals at high risk and provide them with timely measures to prevent harmful consequences.
Dr. Brenda Cabrera-Mendoza’s research seeks to create a predictive model to identify individuals at high risk of suicide by integrating genetic and clinical (e.g., trauma, psychiatric disorders, physical and sexual abuse, demographic) factors that contribute to suicidal behaviors, including suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and non-suicidal self-injury, using large-scale ethnically diverse datasets and machine learning algorithms. This research will address the existing challenge of combining different types of genetic and non-genetic information in developing screening programs to identify individuals at high suicide risk, allowing for more effective prevention strategies and timely and targeted interventions.
Dr. Brenda Cabrera-Mendoza is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. She earned her PhD in Medicine and her MD from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Dr. Rebecca Etkin
Postdoctoral Associate, Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, Yale University Project: Improving the Lived Experiences of Adolescents with Anxiety: Partnering with Families and Testing a Novel Therapy Approach
One in three adolescents will experience clinical anxiety disorders, which have devastating effects on their daily lives, including school and relationships. Anxiety disorders also contribute to depression, substance use and suicidality. It is imperative that adolescents with anxiety disorders receive effective therapy, however, options are limited in their approach and efficacy.
Dr. Rebecca Etkin’s research will test a novel therapy, Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE), that teaches parents how to be supportive and reduce “accommodation” of anxiety, the latter of which research consistently shows leads to worse anxiety. The study will customize SPACE to address the unique needs of these adolescents and their parents. It will also test adolescent-tailored SPACE’s effectiveness by comparing it with a therapy that provides parents with knowledge about anxiety, but not specific guidance. The
investigation aims to provide a treatment for adolescents struggling with anxiety, who cannot or do not engage in “traditional” therapy, or have not benefited from it.
Dr. Rebecca Etkin is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
Dr. Taylor Keding
Research Scientist, Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine Department of Child Psychiatry
Project: Does Successful Psychiatric Treatment Change the Development of Emotion-Related Brain Circuits in Trauma-Exposed Youth?
Mental health conditions related to early-life exposure to traumatic events – one of the most potent risk factors for childhood psychiatric disorders – cause immense suffering for children and families. Up to two-thirds of U.S. youth are exposed to trauma such as physical/sexual abuse or domestic violence. These youth with psychiatric disorders have few treatment options, with existing options varying in efficacy.
To better understand which children need treatment and which treatments will be effective, there is a critical need to optimize interventions by tailoring them to individuals, and more particularly, their neurodevelopmental patterns. One factor is how brain development was altered by trauma exposure. Dr. Taylor Keding’s research will investigate how typical functional brain development progresses in youth ages 9 to 16 years. Gaps between chronological age and machine learning
age predictions will be used to investigate the links among trauma exposure, psychiatric symptoms and emotion circuit maturation. Keding’s research will also study whether gaps and changes represent potential causes in psychiatric symptom reduction with trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Dr. Taylor Keding is a Research Scientist at the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
ABOUT THE MQ FOUNDATION
works in partnership with the UK-based non-profit to support cutting-edge mental health research that has the potential to lead to real-world treatments that will transform how we prevent, diagnose and treat mental illness. MQ and MQF have invested $37 million in new research projects since 2013, which have subsequently attracted an additional $58 million from government and private sources and resulted in 32 new treatments. Recent innovations and findings generated by past MQ/MQF-funded research include:
and. Research is also addressing the development of
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