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2016 Hellman Fellow

Sidra Goldman-Mellor

Health, healthcare utilization, and mortality outcomes among suicide attempters in CA (UCM)

Sidra Goldman-Mellor is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and the Director of the Biostatistics and Data Support Core at UC Merced. Her work focuses on understanding how social disparities and environmental conditions affect risk for depression, anxiety, and suicidal behavior and how these problems contribute to other poor health outcomes.

Her 2016 Hellman Fellowship was the first consequential external grant she received as a young assistant professor studying the epidemiology of suicidal behavior. The award enabled her to acquire and learn from a new, complex and invaluable secondary dataset from California – statewide emergency department records to track individual psychiatric patients’ outcomes over time. She leveraged her Fellowship and the acquired data into a National Institutes of Health grant application that was funded on its first submission and attracted additional federal- and state-level funding. The student research engagement component of her funding has now trained dozens of students to work with epidemiologic data from healthcare settings.

As a direct result of that original Hellman Fellowship award, my research career went in unexpected and exciting directions — leading to new interdisciplinary collaborations, new insights into the nature of suicidal behavior, and new opportunities for burgeoning health researchers.

– Sidra Goldman-Mellor, Ph.D., M.P.H

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