Principal investigator

Dr Jen Dykxhoorn is a psychiatric epidemiologist and public mental health expert. She received her Bachelors in Health Studies from Queen’s University in 2009, her MSc in Epidemiology from the University of Ottawa, and her PhD in 2019 from UCL (University College London).

Dr Dykxhoorn is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL. She is currently funded by the National Institute for Health and Social Care Research (NIHR) through an Advanced Fellowship (2022-2027). Jen has received funding from the NIHR Three Schools Mental Health and NIHR School for Public Health Research’s “prime-pumping” fund for early-career researchers.

Following the completion of her PhD, Jen worked as the programme manager and senior research fellow for the NIHR School for Public Health Research’s Public Mental Health Programme. Jen has also received funding from the NIHR Three Schools

Jen has held roles in local and national public health, including working as an epidemiologist at the Public Health Agency of Canada, a strategic research and policy advisor at the Mental Health Commission of Canada, and a health promoter at the Renfrew County Health Unit.

When she is not softly reading statistics, Jen likes to travel, dive, play piano, and discover great coffee shops.

Research interests

• Social and spatial determinants of mental illnesses, including psychosis, bipolar disorder, and suicide
• Public mental health
• Epidemiological research methods, particularly longitudinal analysis of big data
• Systems modelling and simulation