Pre-Conference Workshop for Trainees and Early Career Scholars
History and objectives of APPA’s Trainee Workshop. Training programs in the fields of psychopathology – funded historically by NIMH, NIDA, and NIAAA – have been connected to the APPA for decades. The workshop started out informally in the early 1990’s, when Johns Hopkins University Professor Bill Eaton convened program directors and trainees on the afternoon before the APPA conference to network, introduce the programs and available trainee fellowship positions, share work in progress, and introduce trainees to leading scholars in the disciplines concerned about the mental illnesses – encompassing population sciences including epidemiology and biostatistics, clinical psychology and psychiatry, social and behavioral sciences, and biological psychiatry including neuroscience and genomics. The APPA provided the ideal venue for training programs to meet, as it also served as an intellectual gathering point for the pioneers in psychopathological research, treatment, and prevention. In recent years, APPA has formalized our connections with psychopathology-focused pre-doctoral and post-doctoral training programs. APPA provides the venue for the workshop and organizes the logistics. And APPA has expanded the reach of the trainee workshop by inviting all trainees who are registered for the APPA Annual Meeting to attend the workshop.
The objectives of the trainee workshop are to provide a forum for trainees to present and receive feedback on their research, for faculty and trainees across programs to interact with one another, to contribute to the career development of trainees through programming that is intellectually stimulating, and finally, to welcome and integrate the next generation of scholars and caregivers in psychopathology into the APPA.
Highlights of the 2025 workshop include the following activites:
- Keynote address by Professor Kerry Keyes (Columbia University) on “Adolescent depression: is social media a cause or a red herring of the rise in youth?”, with Professor Linda Cottler (University of Florida) as discussant
- Panel discussion on the publishing landscape in psychiatry with prominent journal editors including Dr. Dost Öngür (Jama Psychiatry), Dr. Paulo Lizano (Harvard Review of Psychiatry), Dr. Kerry Keyes (Drug & Alcohol Dependence), and Dr. Linda Cottler (Addiction)
- Presentation and discussion with NIH program officers on funding opportunities
- Presentations from trainees in NIH-funded training programs in psychiatry, psychology, and public health