International Projects

🇧🇷 Brazil — 2019 Rio Grande Birth Cohort

The 2019 Rio Grande Birth Cohort is a population-based longitudinal study in Southern Brazil investigating the life course epidemiology of mental health and its intergenerational transmission. Established in 2019, it has tracked over 1,000 mother-child dyads through the COVID-19 pandemic to examine how social inequalities, gender dynamics, and early-life adversity shape developmental trajectories. The cohort maintains a rigorous focus on maternal depression, anxiety, and stress, alongside child developmental milestones and behavioural outcomes. A central theme is the role of parenting and the home environment as modifiable factors in child development. 

Recognising that family dynamics are multi-dimensional, new follow-up waves starting in 2025 are expanding to include fathers. This includes surveying paternal mental health, parenting attitudes, and sex-equitable norms to build a more comprehensive picture of the family system. 

Within this larger framework, we conduct a specialised substudy utilising head-mounted wearable cameras to capture first-person perspectives of mother-child interactions at home. We use synchronised video data analysed through AI-powered software (Noldus FaceReader and Observer XT) to perform real-time emotional analysis. By capturing facial expressions, vocalisations, and physical synchrony, we aim to uncover the specific “relational signatures” that influence child mental health, providing a deeper understanding of “how” maternal context shapes development beyond traditional self-report measures. 

Neurodevelopmental research collaborations – Canada (McGill University, Montreal)

The Pathways to ASD study is a multi-site inception cohort of children with autism with follow-up to adulthood. Pathways includes repeated measures of autism characteristics, mental health, cognitive development, adaptive functioning, family factors, and adult outcomes.  The Pathways in ASD study examines how children with ASD grow and develop. | Pathways in Autism Spe…

Québec 1000 (Q1K) is a large-scale autism research platform that combines clinical, cognitive, neurophysiological (e.g., EEG), genetic, and behavioural data from autistic individuals and their families to accelerate discovery and improve care and services. Welcome to Q1K Families

Caregiver Skills Training (CST) Trial is a feasibility randomised controlled trial evaluating the WHO Caregiver Skills Training programme for parents of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities. The study includes measures of child development and behaviour, caregiver wellbeing, parenting practices, intervention engagement, and implementation outcomes. Building on the success of the feasibility study, we are currently developing a funding application for a large-scale international randomised controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness and implementation of CST across diverse settings.