PHILANTHROPIC FUNDING RECIPIENT
Saving young lives
Dr Binu Jayawardena: Research funding recipient
Philanthropic support for research into suicide prevention
The philanthropic support for the Young Lives Matter Foundation by generous donors such as Dr John Harriott has enabled the foundation to embark upon an ambitious journey of human discovery.
As an undergraduate student of Medicine, Dr Binu Jayawardena was the recipient of the Mary Lockett Foundation Professor in Pharmacology Scholarship established by Dr John Harriott.
Dr Jayawardena graduated from The University of Western Australia's Medical School in 2015 and went on to become a trainee psychiatrist at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. In 2018 he began research at the Young Lives Matter Foundation to combat youth suicide and Dr Harriot was their first donor.
"Thanks to Dr Harriott's donation, YLM was able to kickstart its research operations at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital which enabled me, a psychiatry registrar, to work alongside Dr Michael McCullough, a postdoctoral mathematician, on a systems-level study mapping the assessment of suicidal patients in the emergency department."
Together with Dr Michael McCullough from UWA's School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing, Dr Jayawardena developed a network model of patients presenting with suicidal or parasuicidal behaviours in emergency settings.
"The embedding of a mathematician in a clinical area is a novel approach to investigating suicide risk and serves as an excellent example of pioneering research that YLM seeks to continue in future. "YLM seeks to push the boundaries of mathematical modelling in suicide risk assessment through multidisciplinary research teams and access to large datasets. "
Dr Jayawardena's previous research includes a longitudinal study of depression in doctors, diagnosis of depression in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in depression.
"The philanthropic support for the Young Lives Matter Foundation by generous donors such as Dr John Harriott has enabled the foundation to embark upon an ambitious journey of human discovery. Suicide prevention is an issue that strikes the core of society globally, yet no models exist for the prediction and prevention of suicide. The problem has been so difficult to solve that many clinicians have given up hope of ever achieving progress in the field."
John Harriot
Bequest founder of the Mary Lockett Foundation Professor in Pharmacology
