Andy Tai PhD Candidate


Department of Psychiatry

Faculty of Medicine

As a PhD student, I have been able to expand on my knowledge in psychiatry, improve my research skills, and gain in-depth understanding of brain function and mechanisms underlying mental health problems and substance use disorders toward development of practical interventions. In addition, I believe using online strategies, such as AI and machine learning, in web-based solutions, provides unique opportunities to use available databases in psychiatry and neurosciences for answering novel research questions which can’t simply be answered using traditional methods. As a response to the overdose crisis, the Addiction and Concurrent Disorders Group, part of the University of British Columbia psychiatry department, have proposed to utilize collected healthcare related data from the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control to model fatal overdose and elucidate risk factors of overdose that can be addressed among the drug using population. From our literature review and expertise, we hypothesize that risk of overdosing is highest when an individual has data on a combination of some or all of the following factors: a history of substance use and/or incarceration, drug use history (non-injection), mode of drug use, fentanyl detection, benzodiazepine use, previous overdoses and using alone. 


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