PsychEng Seminar 2025 March 4: Dr. Jacob Vorstman: Precision approaches in pediatric mental health


Tuesday, March 4, 2025
12:10pm-1:30pm


Jacob Vorstman

Speaker: Dr. Jacob Vorstman 

Professor, University of Toronto – Department of Psychiatry;  

Psychiatric Associates Chair in Developmental Psychopathology, Hospital for Sick Children;  

Location: MC331 (Mechanical Engineering Building, 5 King’s College Road M5S 3G8, Room 331) 

Title: Precision approaches in pediatric mental health

Abstract:

In this presentation I will explain the concept of precision medicine and how it can be applied to mental health in children and youth. I will highlight different strategies that can contribute to achieving the objectives of precision medicine, where possible illustrate with research observations. I will discuss how genetic information can be used to inform on treatment targets as well as the prediction of vulnerability for certain neurodevelopmental and psychiatric conditions. I will also discuss the need for large datasets to inform precision medicine and how natural language models may help unlock such data. Finally, I will present some ongoing work involving the use of digital phenotyping tools.

 

Biography:

Jacob Vorstman is Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Clinical Researcher at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. He is Senior Scientist at the SickKids Research Institute and Professor in Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, as well as holder of the SickKids Psychiatry Associates Chair in Developmental Psychopathology.

His work focuses on the elucidation of the genetic architecture of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, and ways to translate basic scientific research knowledge from such studies to implementations that concretely improve mental health care. He is interested in the utility of digital phenotyping methods for the measurement of psychiatric phenotypes and the use of AI to help extract psychiatric data from electronic health records.

Dr Vorstman is the director of the Autism Research Unit at the Hospital for Sick Children; 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.

To help us better plan, please register at below link