Dr Emaediong Akpanekpo

My research is in psychiatric epidemiology applied to people in contact with the criminal justice system. I work primarily with whole-of-population linked administrative data from New South Wales, utilising records from criminal courts, corrective services, youth justice, child protection, hospital admissions, emergency departments, ambulatory mental health services, opioid agonist treatment, and death registrations linked through the Centre for Health Record Linkage. Most of my analytic work happens in secure accredited data environments and uses survival analysis methods including Fine-Gray competing risks models, Aalen-Johansen estimators, multi-state models, and time-updated Cox regression, alongside causal inference approaches such as g-computation and entropy balancing.

The central question across my research is what happens to people after they pass through the justice system, particularly in relation to mental illness, self-harm, injury, and return to custody. I study this across the life course, from adolescents in youth detention through to adults with repeat violent convictions. In younger populations, this includes tracing how contact with child protection, youth justice, and involuntary psychiatric care accumulate across the same lives, and measuring how far the mental health system actually reaches the young people identified as needing it. In adults, my work extends to clinical trial methodology, including the ReINVEST randomised controlled trial of sertraline for impulsive violent reoffending published in eClinicalMedicine, where I contribute ongoing secondary analyses examining personality disorder subgroups, treatment effect estimation in non-randomised comparison arms, and the relationship between affective dysregulation and different forms of violent recidivism. I am also developing validated outcome measures for justice and post-release programs.