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Population Research Center

Seed Grants

PRC Seed Grants provide an excellent opportunity for population researchers at UZH. These grants aim to foster innovation, encourage collaboration, and support early-stage projects in population research. Individual grants of CHF 10'000 to 20'000 are available for a variety of project-related expenses.

Eligibility Open to all UZH population researchers. Projects must involve at least two researchers from different institutes.
Deadline January 31, 2025

To learn more about eligibility, application requirements, and the submission process, please refer to the detailed PDF document.

PRC Seed Grants (PDF, 178 KB)

Access the slides (PDF, 809 KB) from the Seed Grants Information Session held on June 6.

Seed Grants Projects fall semester 2024

Since September 2024, the UZH PRC supports three new innovative and interdisciplinary projects in population research.

Sustainable travel medicine: a “Planetary Health” approach to international travel (the PlanetHealth project)

Dr. Andrea Farnham (Department of Public and Global Health, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute),
Dr. Walter Bierbauer (Psychologisches Institut, Angewandte Sozial- und Gesundheitspsychologie)

The PlanetHealth project aims to address the environmental impact of travel through an interdisciplinary "Planetary Health" approach within the field of travel medicine, combining the expertise of behavioral psychology, epidemiology, and clinicians. Sustainable travel practices, such as the judicious use of antibiotics, proper disposal of medications, being fully vaccinated, using eco-friendly mosquito prevention and sun protection methods, and staying in environmentally conscious accommodations, are crucial in mitigating the impact of travel on environmental pollution and the spread of antibiotic resistance. The PlanetHealth project investigates behavioral patterns, modifiable beliefs, and self-regulatory factors that influence travelers' decisions around travel and aims to promote more sustainable behaviors, as well as identify why certain unsustainable practices prevail (e.g., higher costs). PlanetHealth will develop and implement a quantitative, cross-sectional survey in the travel clinics of Zurich and Australia to gather data on the health and travel behaviors of travelers. The study results will then be disseminated at an interdisciplinary workshop involving travel medicine experts, psychologists, and implementation scientists. The workshop will focus on translating the study’s findings into practical, feasible interventions that can be integrated into travel medicine practice.

Adolescent Well-being in Flux: A Comparative Analysis of Adolescent Health Behaviors and Mental Distress Across Countries and Time

Dr. Clarissa Janousch (University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, Experimental Pharmacopsychology and Psychological Addiction Research),
Dr. Laura Bechtiger (Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development, Risk and Resilience)

The rising youth mental health crisis, characterized by higher levels of internalizing symptoms in more recent cohorts of adolescents, especially adolescent girls, has inspired novel research into understanding its potential drivers and causes. The examined factors have been manifold, ranging from the rise of social media to sexual violence exposure to macroeconomic factors, and these studies typically identified mixed findings for many indicators. Important determinants of mental distress that have received less attention in this context of explaining secular changes are health-risk behaviors. Yet, health-risk behaviors, such as physical inactivity, unhealthy diets, substance use (e.g., alcohol, smoking, cannabis use), and risky sexual behavior are important determinants of individual mental distress and are known to differ between males and females. Since some evidence suggests secular trends also exist in health-risk behaviors, secular changes in health behavior profiles over the past two decades need to be systematically examined in relation to changes in mental distress. Thus, the main aim of this project, which holds significant implications for understanding and addressing the youth mental health crisis, is to bridge diverse and interdisciplinary research fields on health-risk behaviors, mental health, and their social determinants to describe patterns and determinants of health-risk behaviors and mental distress across different countries and time. To this end, we will leverage data from the publicly available Health Behavior in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, an internationally standardized, repeated cross-sectional survey of adolescents from the general population in over 40 countries across Europe and North America. Understanding these patterns and determinants could inform the development of targeted public health interventions aimed at reducing health-risk behaviors and mitigating their impact on adolescent mental health, ultimately helping to address the broader youth mental health crisis.

Digging the digital – Using digital data donations to enrich population research

Dr. Markus Wolf  (Department of Psychology),
Dr. Oliver Grübner (Department of Geography),
Dr. Eileen Neumann (Department of Adult Psychiatry and Psychotherapy),
Nico Pfiffner (Department of Communication andMedia Research; Digital Donation Lab)


Traumatic exposure during political or economic upheavals, health pandemics, natural disasters, or war, are serious threats to a person’s mental health and can have long-lasting negative effects on a population level. Social media and other digital sources used by affected individuals are opening a window into individual’s real live and provide new prospects on risk and protective factors including psychological resources, resilience and coping strategies in times of crisis and beyond. Because these factors are idiosyncratic and dynamic in nature, they are not well-addressed by population science’s classical tool-box. Digging into to this digital sphere – for instance by analyzing activities in popular social media (e.g. Telegram) by Ukrainian residents during the war – offers unprecedented opportunities for population health research.
Accessing this data source, however, is still a major challenge. This is where our project starts. Citizen science initiatives have proposed data donations as a way of accessing such data sources. Recently, the UZH Data Donation Lab (DDL) has developed the Data Donation Module (DDM), a web-module that allows the secure retrieval and processing of individual digital data donations. The DDM processes data such as user-generated web content, social media activity or content, or (passive) smartphone data, all of which have the potential to provide new and unobtrusive insights into a person’s (mental) health.
In our project we aim to develop an interface and data pipeline for digital donations to be attached to large scale population surveys – such as the PRC’s Mental Health Surveillance in Ukraine project (MAP) – to complement structured survey data with unstructured digital data. More specifically, our project has the following goals:

  1. Develop a prototype digital data donation pipeline to collect social media and digital behavioral data by the means of individual data donations alongside classical surveys (e.g., Red Cap).
  2. Assess participants’ attitudes towards digital data donations for the purpose of detection of real-life mental health distress and resilience.
  3. Empirically validate a Ukrainian version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionary to extract standard language features, e.g. emotional tone, from text-based data donations; LIWC is one of the best validated and most widely used dictionary-based text analysis programs worldwide and available in multiple languages, which allows its use across various countries and languages.

Digital epidemiological data has the potential to enrich survey-based structured health data allowing in-situ insights into individuals’ everyday lives, behaviors and health conditions based on their digital activities, contents and traces. Combining structured survey data with unstructured naturalistic data retrieved from the persons’ digital devices offers exciting new prospects for data enrichment in population research. The module developed in this project will be a starting point to use individual data donations in PRC projects and future multilingual population studies.

Since January 2024, the UZH PRC supports three innovative and collaborative projects in population research. All projects address health issues in different age groups.

Dr. Christina Haag (Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care),
Dr. David Bürgin  (Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development)

Recent population-based research has identified a rise of mental health problems in young people, often referred to as the ‘youth mental health crisis’. Accordingly, new insights on risk and protective factors in mental health development are urgently needed to understand the perspectives, concerns, and aspirations of young people today. One aim to achieve this aim is to ask young people directly and to then use mixed-method approaches to analyze their answers.

Traditionally, population-based research has relied heavily on quantitative measures, sidelining text data due to the time-intensive nature of such analyses. However, advancements in natural language processing (NLP) have transformed language analysis, allowing for efficient extraction of themes and emotions from extensive text data. Despite these breakthroughs, the integration of text and quantitative data in longitudinal population research remains largely unexplored. Yet, this holds potential for nuanced large-scale analyses of individual narratives in conjunction with conventional quantitative measures.

This project aims to showcase how insights into youth mental health can be enhance when seamlessly incorporating text assessments into longitudinal population research (compared to relying solely on standardized quantitative assessments). We will analyze qualitative text data from the prospective-longitudinal Zurich Project on the Social Development from Childhood to Adulthood  (z-proso, PIs: Prof. Manuel Eisner, Dr. Denis Ribeaud, Prof. Lilly Shanahan) which investigates psychosocial development from childhood into adulthood. Specifically, this project will examine life events that adolescents and young adults deem highly significant. In doing so, the project will assess the emotional tone of these events, and aim to understand how such events evolve from adolescence to young adulthood. Additionally, the study will examine the worries and hopes about the future that young adults report, and how these hopes and worries, in turn, are associated with current mental health.

Co-led by early career researchers Dr. David Bürgin from the 'Risk and Resilience' research group at the Jacobs Center for Productive Youth Development (Prof. Lilly Shanahan) and Dr. Christina Haag  from the Digital & Mobile Health Group at the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care (Prof. Viktor von Wyl), this PRC seed grant aims to contribute new insights into risk and protective mechanisms in mental health development by leveraging population-based text-data with natural language processing.

PD Dr. Michael von Rhein (University Children's Hospital Zurich) 
Prof. Boris Quednow (Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Zurich)
Dr. Holger Dressel (Department of Epidemiology, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute)
Corina S. Rüegg (Department of Epidemiology, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute)
Prof. Oskar Jenni (University Children's Hospital Zurich)

In recent years, the number of children with special educational needs has increased significantly - both in elementary school and in early childhood. Obviously, more children than before have a global developmental delay, a language development disorder, an autism spectrum disorder, ADHD or other behavioral problems. This can be partly explained by medical advances: Thanks to improved medical care, many more children with significant risk factors (such as children with congenital heart defects or former premature babies) survive today than 20 years ago. These children are more likely to have developmental disorders or disabilities than children without such risks. However, these factors cannot fully explain the increase in numbers. Other possible explanations include changes in biological and environmental risk factors. Recently, a number of environmental toxins and pollutants have been suspected of having negative effects on health and development. An increase in parental consumption of medication and psychoactive substances could also be considered as a possible cause. Negative influences on early childhood development have also been described through experiences of social deprivation, psychosocial trauma or social isolation. However, systematic studies on the etiology of developmental disorders are rare, particularly regarding modifiable or even avoidable causes. We therefore plan to perform an umbrella review on environmental factors, drugs and toxins as risk factors for developmental delay in children, which will lay the grounds for clinical studies targeting specific factors potentially causing developmental disorders in early childhood.

PD Dr. Cesar Hincapié (Department of Epidemiology, Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention Institute [EBPI], Balgrist University Hospital – University Spine Centre Zurich [UWZH])
Prof. Thomas Friemel  (Department of Communication and Media Research)

Collaborators: Dr. Léonie Hofstetter, Nathalie Schweyckart, Dr. Christian Brand, Prof. Mazda Farshad, Prof. Milo Puhan, Prof. Laura Rosella
 
The challenge
Total hip arthroplasty (THA) and total knee arthroplasty (TKA) are standard surgical procedures in Switzerland. The Swiss National Joint Registry (SIRIS) captures data on over 95% of these surgeries annually—approximately 22,000 THAs and 18,000 TKAs per year. Despite the typical lifespan of joint replacements being 25 years on average, a small proportion requires premature revision surgery imposing significant challenges for both patients and the healthcare system. Clinical prediction modeling and effective public communication of surgical outcomes is paramount for decision-making, encompassing perspectives from patients, surgeons, hospitals, and the health system. While clinical prediction models are proliferating, the optimal practices for communicating their results to the public and other stakeholders remain unclear.
 
The opportunity
This project presents a unique opportunity to leverage clinical prediction models for improved decision-making in total joint arthroplasty. These models may offer valuable insights into the risks and probable outcomes of THA and TKA, enhancing preoperative shared decision-making for all stakeholders. The incorporation of Bayesian belief networks may hold promise in identifying causal links between presurgical factors and outcomes, potentially serving as decision support tools to enhance communication between patients and surgeons. By incorporating end-user perspectives and facilitating public communication of these decision support tools, our project aims to foster transparency, build trust, and empower individuals to actively engage in their healthcare decisions.
 
Overall aim
The overarching aim of our project is to advance understanding of prediction modeling and public health communication concerning patient-reported outcomes and revision surgery after THA and TKA, using population-based SIRIS data and qualitative approaches.
 
Specific objectives
1.   To develop and validate prediction models for patient outcomes (health-related quality of life, pain intensity, and satisfaction) one year after THA and TKA.
2.   To develop and validate prediction models for premature revision surgery within 5 years after THA and TKA.
3.   To identify predictors of patient outcomes and revision surgery after THA and TKA using Bayesian belief networks as a clinical decision support tool.
4.   To qualitatively describe and assess the effects of public health communication related to prediction modelling on patients, surgeons, hospitals, and the health system.