Hello, and welcome to my website!
I’m Julia, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
My background is in development economics (BSc and MSc) and Psychiatry (DPhil/PhD). My work focuses on creating affordable treatment for depression and other mental health disorders, especially in places where resources are scarce.
My work is divided into three main topics:
- Diagnosis. I work with large surveys to understand mental health disorders around the world. My past projects include working with the Gallup World Poll and collaborating with the Refugee Economies Programme at Oxford University on a multicountry representative survey among refugees in East Africa. Currently, I’m working with colleagues at Harvard to analyze data from the World Mental Health Survey.
- Developing low-cost interventions. This work includes developing digital mental health interventions and training non-specialists to deliver treatments in low-resource settings such as rural South Africa, Uganda, and India.
- Optimizing treatment. I’m currently working on two projects focused on making treatments as effective as possible:
- The first project is a large precision trial in India, where we are randomizing patients with depression to either brief psychotherapy or antidepressant medication. The objective is to predict which patients will respond better to either of the two treatments using patient’s baseline characteristics.
- The second study explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve the training and supervision of non-specialists in psychological therapy, aiming to increase the efficiency, reach, quality, and cost-effectiveness of treatment.
Contact information
Email: julia_ruizpozuelo@hms.harvard.edu
Twitter: @JuliaRzPz
Julia R. Pozuelo 