ADHD, Comorbidity, and Longitudinal Research

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.19695
For this podcast, we are joined by Dr. Aja Murray, lecturer in psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and winner of ACAMH’s Kathy Sylva ‘Rising Star’ Award 2021.

Aja begins by providing us with an insight into her background, her research interests, and her role as a developmental psychologist who specializes in mental health, before commenting on what it meant to her to have received the ACAMH ‘Rising Star’ Award in 2021, for best scientific contribution to child and adolescent mental health by a person within 10 years of their first published paper in a peer-reviewed journal.
With Aja’s primary research interests relating to the developmental aspects of mental health phenotypes and their comorbidity, with a particular interest in ADHD, autism, and conduct problems, Aja shares some recent highlights from her work.
As the deputy director of the Evidence for Better Lives Study, Aja also discloses the aims of this study, plus their findings so far. In addition, Aja also mentions her work with the Zurich Project on Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood with a focus on violence prevention. Aja also details further projects that she has been involved in, including securing grants for a project supporting student mental health, and another to address the adverse impacts of domestic violence during pregnancy.
Furthermore, Aja comments on the translation of evidence-based research into practice, why evidence-based research is so important when it comes to child and young people’s mental health, plus what can be done to disseminate and promote evidence-based science.