Digital Phenotyping for Mental Health

A Latin American Biobank for Large-Scale Genetics Research on Severe Mental Illness (R01 MH123157) 

May 1, 2020 – February 28, 2025 (NIH/NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health)

This project will develop and make available to the scientific community the Latin American Biobank of Severe Mental Illness (LAB-SMI). Latin American descended populations, which constitute the fastest growing ethnicity in the United States, are poorly represented in psychiatric genetics research. We will reverse this underrepresentation, accelerating discoveries and reducing health disparities by creating the Latin American Biobank for Severe Mental Illness (LAB-SMI), consisting of 50,000 SMI cases and 50,000 population controls ascertained by screening electronic medical records (EMR) from the Paisa region of Colombia. We will genotype and conduct genetic analyses of SMI in this 100K sample, and better characterize SMI through analyses of the longitudinal EMR.

Powering Genetic Discovery for Severe Mental Illness in Latin American and African Ancestries (U01 MH125042) 

September 14, 2020 – July 31, 2025 (NIH/NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health)

Genetic discovery for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder lags behind that in other areas of medicine, where the identification of mutations responsible for familial forms of major disorders has yielded extraordinary biological insights. However, recent successes in gene identification from both rare and common variant analyses indicate what the field needs to do to catch up: expand the size, diversity, and scope of genetic studies. To that end, we will create the Populations Underrepresented in Mental illness Association Studies (PUMAS) Project, a collaboration of investigators from the US, South America and Africa with the strongest track record of large-scale psychiatric genetic research in Latino and African populations, along with several of the field’s leaders in genetic data generation and analysis.

Serious Mental Illness and Incarceration: Piloting the Use of a Multi-sector Linked Administrative Dataset (R34 MH128397) 

January 17, 2022 – December 31, 2024 (NIH/NIMH, National Institute of Mental Health)

Mass incarceration of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) is a public health and human rights crisis. Not since the mid-19^th century has the criminal justice system played such a large role in how American society responds to mental illness. The major purpose of this study is to use a multi-sector administrative database to develop, validate, and pilot the use of algorithms to evaluate the effects of existing crisis intervention programs on mental health and social outcomes (incarceration, homelessness) for individuals with SMI.

UCLA Depression Grand Challenge-Apple (Digital Mental Health Study, DMHS) 

August 1, 2020 – February 28, 2025 (Apple Inc.)

The UCLA Depression Grand Challenge (DGC) launched a research project in collaboration with Apple, seeking to develop more objective measures for detecting depression and anxiety. The 3-year study aims to obtain objective measures of factors such as sleep, physical activity, heart rate and daily routines to illuminate the relationship between these factors and symptoms of depression and anxiety. The Center for SMART Health provides support for subject recruitment; technical expertise in mHealth; and data analytics.