Sophie Khomtchenko

Sophie Khomtchenko is a rising senior at Brown University, concentrating in Psychology. She was drawn to global mental health for its emphasis on bridging the gap between policy, research, and communities. Last summer, she was a research assistant at Vanderbilt University’s Research on Conflict and Collective Action Lab, studying potential deterrents of institutional violence. While studying abroad in the Netherlands last spring, she trained to assist in a developmental psychopathology lab at the University of Amsterdam. She is specifically interested in education and development, having worked as a TEFL instructor for elementary, middle, and high school students abroad.

During her internship at the Center for Global Mental Health, Sophie worked with Dr. Sabrina Hermosilla at Columbia University in conjunction with the American University of Beirut to understand the relationship between health and education in Lebanese youth using the Participatory Assessment Tool for Mapping Social Connections (PATMSC). She assisted in the development of a scoping review by working on data extraction from peer-reviewed and grey literature and by working to update IRB and funding documents. She also assisted in creating interview questions for key informants in Lebanon in addition to school-aged children and their parents.