Precision child and youth
mental health conference

Dr. Giovanni Briganti is a psychiatrist and biostatistician. At the University of Mons, he serves as head of computational medicine and neuropsychiatry as well as Chair of AI & Digital Medicine. At the University Hospital Centers HELORA, he serves as head of psychiatry. 

Dr. Paul Arnold is the Director of the Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research & Education and a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medical Genetics and the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary. Dr. Arnold is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist with particular expertise in pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). His research focuses on precision child and youth mental health, including the genetics of childhood OCD and pharmacogenetics. He leads the Pan-Canadian Initiative Linking Genomic, Environmental and Mental Health Data in Children and Youth (Pan-GEM), which brings together a transdisciplinary team of researchers from across Canada to examine how genetics and environmental risk factors interact to impact the onset and progression of mental health concerns.

Dr. Anna Moore is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, and Clinical Consultant in Paediatric Psychological Medicine. She leads Timely, a research group advancing precision mental health through predictive technologies and early intervention strategies for young people. Her team developed CADRE, a national platform integrating health, education, and social care data to support ethical, scalable research, now expanding via the Mental Health Mission. Dr. Moore also directs D-CYPHR, the UK’s first recallable genomics cohort for children and youth, enabling integration of genetic insights into mental health research. She previously led the national rollout of i-THRIVE, a needs-based model for youth mental health care now adopted across much of the UK.

Dr. Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli is the Tommy Fuss Endowed Chair in Precision Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she directs the EPIC Lab and serves as Associate Director of the Center for Precision Psychiatry. She also founded the Northeastern University Biomedical Imaging Center. Her research uses multimodal neuroimaging to uncover brain-based biomarkers for early detection, prediction of treatment response, and precision therapeutics in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. Dr. Whitfield-Gabrieli’s work spans conditions such as schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and ADHD, with a focus on translating neuroscience into clinical practice.

Dr. Christine Armour MS MD FRCPC CCMG, is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Ottawa, Clinical Geneticist at CHEO, co-Medical Director (Genetics) of Prenatal Screening Ontario, and Investigator at CHEO Research Institute. Dr. Armour is a leading clinical expert in prenatal genetics who works with policy makers to improve prenatal and reproductive care. Her research program studies the application of innovative technologies in prenatal screening, prenatal diagnostics, and reproductive care. She also applies novel data science and machine learning approaches to population-based data to improve the performance of Ontario’s prenatal screening system and develop predictive models. Dr. Armour efficiently translates research findings into clinical practice: she is a Member of Ontario’s Provincial Genetics Advisory Committee, has led several Canadian guidelines on the clinical application of genetic technologies, helped establish Prenatal Screening Ontario, and co-developed provincial eligibility criteria for non-invasive prenatal testing and fetal exome sequencing.

Dr. Jacob Vorstman is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and Senior Scientist at the SickKids Research Institute. His work focuses on the elucidation of the genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders and finding ways to translate basic scientific research knowledge to implementations that concretely improve mental health care. Together with his team he initiated a multidisciplinary clinic called DAGSY (Developmental Assessment of Genetically Susceptible Youth), designated for children with genetic risk variants associated with psychiatric or neurodevelopmental outcomes.