Indexing childhood maltreatment and examining associations with later mental health
Sara Scardera is a PhD student in School/Applied Child Psychology at McGill University, under the supervision of Dr. Geoffroy and Dr. Isabelle Ouellet-Morin. She holds a BA in Psychology, with distinction, from Concordia University, and a MA in School/Applied Child Psychology from McGill University.
Her research experiences throughout her undergraduate and master’s degree have cultivated her interest in studying the role of risk and protective factors in the development of suicide-related tendencies, depression, and disordered eating among young adults. Her undergraduate and MA projects have led to two first-author publications now published in Eating and Weight Disorders and JAMA Network Open.
For her PhD, Sara is working on developing the first childhood maltreatment index in the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Children Development cohort. She will then use this childhood maltreatment index to investigate how the interaction between childhood maltreatment (environmental) and genes (polygenic risk scores) may shape later mental health.
Sara’s PhD research is currently supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, the Quebec Network on Suicide, Mood Disorders and Related Disorders and the Graduate Excellence Fellowship from McGill University.
