Dr Jennifer Nicholas
Co-chair
Dr Jen Nicholas is a research fellow at the Centre for Youth Mental health, University of Melbourne and Orygen, the world’s largest youth mental health research institute. Her research interests relate to how technology can both i) increase the availability, effectiveness, and reach of mental health interventions, and ii) support services to provide 21st century mental health care.
Jen completed her PhD in digital mental health for early intervention in bipolar disorder in late 2017 at the University of New South Wales and the Black Dog Institute. She then spent 18months at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA, at the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies as a postdoctoral research fellow, before returning to Australia as a Research Fellow at Orygen.
In 2022, Jen will begin her NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellowship in digital mental health implementation. For years, evidence-based digital interventions have promised to address limitations in accessing high quality, sustainable mental health care – but have so far failed to deliver. Her work will address this failure of research translation by refining, evaluating, and disseminating key implementation strategies in digital youth mental health and designing the next generation of implementation-ready digital interventions. This work will build on her recent research on the integration of MOST, a digital youth mental health intervention into youth mental health services across Victoria.