From University to Research: A Conversation with an Aspiring Academic Psychiatrist

Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH)

DOI: 10.13056/acamh.19272
For this podcast, we are delighted to interview aspiring academic psychiatrist Clara Faria, winner of the ACAMH 2021 Undergraduate Clinical Trainee of the Year Award and ACAMH’s first Young Person’s Ambassador.

Clara sets the scene by providing insight into what it meant to her to be recognised as ACAMH’s 2021 Undergraduate Clinical Trainee of the Year, as well as being named as the first ACAMH Young Person’s Ambassador.
Having been previously divided between doing paediatrics and psychiatric training due to her interest in working with children, Clara talks us through how she resolved this conflict and discusses how she became involved with research in mental health, her role as a research assistant at the Laboratory of Panic and Respiration, and how this sparked her interest in child and adolescent mental health.
Clara also explores how she balanced the combination of work, research, and study during her undergraduate studies, and shares tips for others who are following a similar path.
Clara talks to us about her current work on two different main projects. The first is a systematic review predicting factors in ADHD diagnosis at the University of Southampton, and the latter is a genome-wide association study of anxiety disorders in Brazil. Clara discusses what her role is in both projects and provides an insight into what each project entails.
Furthermore, as Clara’s research encompasses both the UK and Brazil, Clara explores what insights she has gained from this exposure to different demographic groups and different health systems, as well as why it is so important in the field of child and adolescent mental health to disseminate evidence-based science to the broader population.