Tom read Natural Sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA (Hons) in 2022. His interest in mental health has developed recently, having started his undergraduate studies in the physical sciences and progressively migrated to psychology in subsequent years. While at Cambridge, he worked on a research project assessing the relationship between digital exclusion during the COVID-19 pandemic and mental health symptoms among adolescents (now published in Scientific Reports).

Tom is interested in the relationship between social media and digital technology use and mental health symptoms and diagnoses. He makes use of large population studies to analyse the longitudinal trajectories of mental health and how they are related to technology. He is passionate about upholding integrity in scientific research and about translating robust research findings into public and policy impact. He is also always keen to contribute to building more reproducible, efficient and approachable data analysis procedures, and to collaborate with others who feel the same!

During the rotation year of his PhD, he completed three quite disparate projects which gifted him with a number of new skills. In the Mechanism theme, he tried his hand at computational psychiatry and had his first experience of using ecological momentary assessment data. In the Population theme, he solidified his previous epidemiological work with a hardcore data wrangling challenge. Finally, in the Intervention theme, he explored the basics of psychopharmacology and got to grips with qualitative research. During that time he has also picked up a new programming language, and now works in both R and Julia.

Outside of academia, Tom may be found reading, baking/cooking (poorly), at the piano (pending having the space to put one), watching Netflix, partaking in the odd video game, planning his next getaway, or enjoying the London nightlife.

Email: thomas.metherell.22@ucl.ac.uk

Twitter: @tom_metherell