West LA Times

Dr. Juliet Beni Edgcomb, associate director of the Mental Health Informatics and Data Science Hub at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, has been awarded the 2024 Klerman Prize for Exceptional Clinical Research by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Edgcomb, who also serves as an assistant professor-in-residence in the department of psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was honored for her research into developing set rules to identify children and adolescents with suicide-related symptoms using electronic health record data.

Her research bridges clinical research informatics with child mental health through collaboration with the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Biomedical Informatics Program and the UCLA Department of Medicine Statistics Core.

Utilizing an electronic health record training set that included data from 400 children and adolescents, Edgcomb identified those presenting to healthcare providers with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. She has expanded this research to develop and validate methods to detect suicide-related visits among 3,400 children.