Oleguer Plana-Ripoll Named the 2024 Rising Star Awardee
Oleguer Plana-Ripoll is an associate professor at Aarhus University (Denmark), where he leads a research group working on psychiatric and social epidemiology. After completing his BSc in Mathematics and MSc in Statistics in Barcelona, he moved to Denmark, where he did a PhD in register-based epidemiology at Aarhus University. As a postdoc, he joined the Niels Bohr Professorship program of research led by Prof. John McGrath, and he was awarded in 2019 a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship that allowed him to work with Prof. Harvey Whiteford and his team at the University of Queensland (Australia). In 2021, Oleguer was awarded a Lundbeck Foundation Fellowship and, shortly after this, a Sapere Aude grant from Independent Research Fund Denmark. These starting grants allowed him to start his own research group at Aarhus University. His team works on the development and application of epidemiological methods for psychiatric research, particularly in research using data from administrative healthcare records.
Statement:
I am deeply honored to receive the SIRS Rising Star Award 2024. This award not only recognizes my contributions but also underscores the immense support that SIRS provides to early career researchers. I have been a member of SIRS and I have actively participated in several annual meetings since embarking on my postdoctoral journey, and I have always been impressed by that. My research focuses on leveraging administrative registers to gain a better understanding of the causes and consequences of mental disorders from an epidemiological perspective. This work is inherently collaborative and interdisciplinary, and I have been fortunate to learn from brilliant mentors, including John McGrath and Preben Bo Mortensen. Their guidance has been invaluable in shaping my research trajectory. I am also profoundly grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with talented colleagues, collaborators, postdocs, and students. As I continue to explore new avenues in mental health research, I remain committed to advancing our understanding of these complex conditions.
