22/01/26
Celebrating a year of partnerships, innovation, and Impact
Happy new year from the CAMHS Digital Lab! We have spent the past few weeks remembering 2025, and wanted to share some of the highlights. From personal achievements to long-awaited publications, it was a productive and impactful year. We welcomed 4 PhD students, began new partnerships, and started a film club… read on to find out more about our 2025!
Publication highlights
The Lab’s research was published in various leading journals, including the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the British Journal of Psychiatry, European Psychiatry, JMIR, and Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
Paper spotlight, lead author Dr. Alice Wickersham (Academic Lead): Maternal expressions of warmth and negativity and adolescent mental health: using longitudinal monozygotic twin-difference analyses to approach causal inference
Events & engagement
Many members of the Lab attended the 2025 Congress of the European Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) in Strasbourg, with Lab members including Dr. Asilay Seker, Dr. Judith Dineley, and Dr. Nicoletta Adamo presenting.
Amongst a variety of conference presentations, events, and workshops, a couple highlights were Dr. Po-Chang Tseng and Zoë Firth presenting at the ‘Great British Brainoff’ in November, and PhD candidate Anna Morris presenting at the Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT) in Cambridge, pictured below.
Our paper on the Lab’s working model was published by the Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH), with head of the Lab Prof. Johnny Downs, Academic Lead Alice Wickersham, and Zoë Firth sitting down with Dr. Clara Faria to discuss it on the ACAMH podcast ‘Mind the Kids’.
Spotlight on sustainabilityÂ
Dr. Shuo Zhang discussed eco-anxiety on a podcast episode with King’s Climate and Sustainability as part of their series ‘Mental health in a changing climate’.
Sustainability Champions Sarjhana Ragunathan Brindha and Zoë Firth wrote a blog on digital mental health for the Association of Child & Adolescent Mental Health.
Awards & recognition
Dr. Asilay Seker was the 2025 winner of Higher Resident Doctor Award from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Huge congratulations also go to Dr. Shuo Zhang who won the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Harrington Writing Prize, for her essay ‘Effect of social media on mental health and emotional wellbeing of young people’.
Lab implementation fellow Dr. Jude Dineley has been granted a NIHR Development and Skills Enhancement (DSE) Award. This highly competitive award will support Jude’s work in evaluating and implementing AI transcription and reporting tools to improve clinical efficiency, driving key benefits for NHS services.
Partnerships & projects
We launched a new partnership and video with Elstree Screen Arts Academy, an academy for young people aged 14-19 to train in screen media; you can read more about this partnership from ESA Academy Principal Director Chris Mitchell here. Our first collaboration was a video about the ‘Five Minute Speech Sample’ project led by the Lab, which is the first of three ‘Research EXPLORED’ videos about Lab projects. We’re grateful to Chris Mitchell, Rosey Whitehead, and the young people at ESA Academy for all their amazing creative work on Research EXPLORED, and we’re excited for another year of partnership.
Awarded by the Maudsley Charity, we began work as partners on three ‘Building Brighter Futures’ projects. We are partnering with the Well Centre Charity to scale their Integrated Youth Hubs, working with the Maudsley Education Consultation Service on a project to support students struggling with school attendance, and working  with voluntary sector organisations in South London to develop a community-led brief intervention for young people with emerging mood problems. You can read about each of the funded projects here.
Progression
Dr. Nick Cummins, head of the Voice and Speech Processing for Health group at King’s, was promoted to Senior Lecturer.
Our Lab Lead, Johnny Downs, was promoted to Professor of Child Psychiatry and Health Informatics.
Lastly - but certainly not least – 2025 saw the launch of a long-anticipated ‘Horror Film Club’. Led jointly by Arjoon Arunasalam, Zoë Firth, and Dr. Alice Wickersham, the growing club enjoyed 4 films and one horror film quiz in 2025.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this year’s success. Here’s to building even brighter futures together in 2026!