Dr. Alexia Polillo is a staff scientist with the Slaight Family Centre for Youth in Transition at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). She is also an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Division of Social and Behavioural Health Sciences in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.
She obtained her PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Ottawa and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at CAMH. She has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Mitacs, and the CAMH Foundation.
Areas of research
Dr. Polillo’s research program is at the intersection of digital mental health, social media, evaluation, and lived experience engagement. Her research focuses on evaluating hospital- and community-based mental health services to improve access, engagement, and quality of care using mixed and participatory methods and leverages digital tools and social media to improve youth mental health.
Currently, her work is supported by the University of Toronto Department of Psychiatry’s Reasons for Hope Fund, which uses wearable devices, ecological momentary assessment, and mobile sensing to identify digital markers of psychopathology among young people with mental illness. She is also co-lead of digital phenotyping on the Cohort Network for Adolescents and Youth with Multiple Mental Health Conditions (CALM) study funded by the Ontario Brain Institute and co-lead of engagement on the Toronto Adolescent and Youth (TAY) Cohort Study funded by the CAMH Foundation.
Publications
View Dr. Polillo’s publications on Google Scholar.