Meet the ChAMP Team!

Dr. Ellen McGinnis and Dr. Ryan McGinnis

Dr. Ellen McGinnis’s background centers around Clinical Psychology. She is broadly interested in the physiology of internalizing problems and how we can use accessible technologies to create clinically useful assessment and interventions. Working collaboratively with colleagues in biomedical engineering, her projects include:

1. Digital phenotypes of child mental health. Using wearable sensors and voice detection, I conduct research aimed toward screening for preschool anxiety and depression using a mobile phone app.

2. Digital therapeutics. Using physiological measurements collected from mobile phones, I have created a biofeedback intervention for panic attacks and evaluated its effectiveness. See more of Ellen’s background here.

Dr. Ryan McGinnis has led cross-disciplinary research teams at health technology start-ups and in academia to advance his translational research agenda which pairs innovations in wearable and mobile technologies with his expertise in biomedical signal processing, machine learning, biomechanics, and computational dynamics for the development and validation of novel digital biomarkers and therapeutics. His current efforts are focused on developing new digital therapeutics for improving the mobility and functional independence of individuals living with multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, optimizing orthopedic rehabilitation outcomes, and addressing mental health problems in children and young adults. Read more about Ryan here.

Together, Dr. Ryan McGinnis and Dr. Ellen McGinnis completed the foundational research that led to the coordination of app development necessary for the current iteration of the ChAMP mobile application.

Bryn Loftness

Bryn Loftness is a current doctoral student at University of Vermont in the Complex Systems and Data Science PhD program, advised by Dr. Ryan McGinnis, Dr. Ellen McGinnis, and Dr. Nick Cheney. In regards to the ChAMP system, Bryn has been a significant contributor in bringing the ChAMP system to life. Bryn completed all signal processing, data cleaning, and analysis in Loftness et al., 2022 and in the most recent forthcoming ChAMP analysis release (under review), developing this open-access educational website to accompany the ChAMP mobile app, creating the interactive processing platform for researchers with no coding background to process data from the ChAMP app efficiently, conducting and training undergraduate researchers to conduct clinical data collection visits, engineering the custom waistbelt system required for collecting ChAMP mobile app data, creating the step-by-step manual for the waistbelt construction, presenting preliminary candidate biomarkers and identifying potential redundancies in our sensor array to optimize deployment in future scaling efforts (Loftness et al., 2022), mentoring several Masters and undergraduate students to complete and present their own analysis using ChAMP data, and passionately sharing this work at several public speaking and research symposia.

XiXi (Julia) Halvorson-Phelan

XiXi worked as the clinical research coordinator for the KID Study and played an integral role in coordinating the start of the study and getting it off the ground. This involved developing community recruitment strategies, screening, and scheduling the families, overseeing the undergraduate student researchers, and helping the undergraduate student researchers. In addition to the back-end work, XiXi also managed the lab visits, facilitating the semi-structured interviews with the participant’s parents and scoring/helping to diagnose the children. XiXi (Julia) Halvorson-Phelan is now a current medical student at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine.

Carter Bradshaw

As a research coordinator in this study, Carter played an integral role in the collection of the open-access data set we release with this platform. Carter worked diligently interviewing parents about their child’s feelings and behaviors surrounding mental health. Following her work on recruitment from the community, she pre-screens for anxiety and depressive disorders and schedules families for lab visits. For each participant involved in the study, the parent or guardian and Carter go through each symptom of mental health disorders using the DSM 5 criteria. She is tasked with getting a broader picture of what parents or guardians are seeing at home with their children. She also helps to train the undergraduate research assists to facilitate the ChAMP mobile application and sensor usage for the various mood-induction tasks during child clinical assessments.

Shania Lunna

Shania is a research coordinator for this study. Shania has played a role in recruiting participants and pre-screening participants for anxiety and depression. Shania conducts in-depth interviews with parents and guardians on their child’s mental health, going through each symptom of each mental health disorder using DSM-5 criteria. She also assists in coding and scoring the data from each interview and survey the participants complete. Shania has also launched our 1-year follow-up study to assess if diagnostic information and recommended resources were utilized following participation in the study.

Aisling O’Leary

Background to be added at a later date.

Our Awesome Undergraduate Research Assistants!

This work would not be possible without the wonderful participating families and the support of the undergraduate research assistants at UVM conducting lab visits: Anna Jane Brown, Antranig Douglas, Daniella Pedro, Greta Wright, Haley Meskin, Jocelyn Botelho, Kiley Robles, Lauren Dasilva, Mia Sorongon, Nadia Huber, Rylee Masson, Samantha Spear, Stevie Roberts, and Taylor Mullen.