Psychiatrist receives 2024 Klerman Prize for innovative youth suicide prevention research

Dr. Juliet Beni Edgcomb, MD, PhD, was named the winner of the 2024 Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical Research by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.  

Edgcomb is the associate director of the Mental Health Informatics and Data Science (MINDS) Hub in the Semel Institute and an assistant professor-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. 

The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation recognized Edgcomb for her research into the development of set rules to clearly identify children and adolescents with suicide-related symptoms using electronic health record data. This research translates methods from clinical research informatics to child mental health, a bridge made possible by collaboration with the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Biomedical Informatics Program and the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core. 

The foundation recognized Edgcomb’s research as “a significant step forward in suicide prevention.” 

“She has worked with an electronic health record ‘training set’ that includes data from 400 children and adolescents, to identify those presenting to healthcare providers with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. The aim is to identify the predictive variables best defining each pertinent phenotype and to produce a predicted probability of each suicide-related phenotype for each child,” the foundation stated in its award announcement. “She has recently expanded this research to develop and validate methods to detect suicide-related visits among 3,400 children.” 

The foundation is a nonprofit organization that awards research grants to enhance treatments for and prevention of mental illnesses.