Süheyla SekerGuest researcher
About me
I am a postdoctoral research fellow interested in developmental psychopathology and child welfare.
My project adopts a life-course perspective. Based on register data, the main objective of my project is to increase scientific knowledge of the trajectories and possible risk and protective factors of psychopathology among out-of-home placed individuals across the lifespan. My project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF, see Links).
Research
In September 2022, I completed my PhD at the University Psychiatric Clinical in Basel, Switzerland, where I focused on the prevalence and development of mental disorders among out-of-home placed individuals, using longitudinal and meta-analytic approaches. In collaboration with the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel, I also coordinated a pilot study on care alumni parents, examining their psychosocial outcomes and their children's development using a comperehensive test battery.
From October 2022 to April 2024, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University Psychiatric Clinics in Basel. I led a project to validate a parent-reported German attachment relationship questionnaire for pre-school aged children in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In addition, I contributed to studies investigating adult outcomes among children and adolescents with out-of-home care experiences.
Since May 2024, I have been a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Social Work of Stockholm University, working on long-term trajectories of psychopathology, criminal convictions, and risk and protective factors among out-of-home placed individuals. My work, using a sibling design, focuses on gender differences across the lifespan at the intersection of child welfare and developmental psychopathology.