Question: You are pursuing digital psychiatry at PhD, what does that entail.

Linda Kokwaro answered on 17 May 2022:

Great question. So, I took a bit of an unconventional route. Usually, people go through medical school and also do rersearch in psychiatry, as they specialize/train to become psychiatrists. They may decide do what’s called an MD, PhD (research on top of medical school). My journey however is different. It started with a strong interest/inclination towards clinical neuroscience (particularly, diseases that affect the brain). This led me to do a masters in medical neuroscience at a university hospital, where I worked on a topic related to neurodegenerative disease research. While doing my masters, I worked as a research assistant for a group of doctors and innovators doing research in psychiatry and working on developing an app to help patients affected by depression. That’s how my intererst in pursuing a PhD in psychiatry grew and through the network I had gained while working at my job, I was able to interview for a PhD position. In summary , through internships and research assistant jobs, I ended up discovering that I liked working on research directly related to patients affected by servere pscychiatric diseases and improving their quality of life.