Our CHDS team

He has been involved with CHDS since 2015 and became co-director in 2023. His research focus lies at the interface of mental health, substance use, and criminal offending. He also convenes postgraduate teaching in forensic mental health at the University of Otago, and works clinically as a forensic psychiatrist.

She joined CHDS in 2024 as a co-director. Toni concurrently holds a role as Research & Operations Manager at the NZ Brain Research Institute (NZBRI) in the Department of Medicine. Her research interests include neurodegenerative disorders (such as Parkinson’s disease) and Māori health equity, and she brings experience in epidemiology and longitudinal cohorts. 

Professor Joseph “Joe” Boden is a Principal Scientist with the CHDS, where he has worked since the early 2000s and served as Director from 2019 to 2023. Originally trained as an experimental social psychologist, he earned his PhD from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1995. Before joining CHDS, he held academic posts at the University of Plymouth (UK) and the University of Southern Queensland (Australia).
Joe’s research focuses on the intersections of substance use, mental health, and maladaptive behaviour, and he has published widely on these topics using the CHDS’s unique longitudinal dataset. Beyond academia, he contributes his expertise to governmental and policy advisory groups, including the New Zealand Ministries of Health, Justice, and Social Development, helping translate research evidence into policy and practice.

Katie is an Associate Professor and a Registered Clinical Psychologist. Her research explores the cognitive, psychological, and hormonal aspects of mood disorders, and how to target these directly, including with cognitive training programmes, psychological therapies, and environmental interventions (e.g., light therapy). She has extensive experience leading clinical trials of novel interventions, including large-scale randomised controlled trials of culturally-adapted cognitive remediation programmes for people with depression and bipolar disorder. Katie has been awarded 10 major research grants as Principal Investigator, including the prestigious Sir Charles Hercus Fellowship from the Health Research Council of New Zealand (2018).

Kate Eggleston is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, Christchurch.

Kate is involved in the Departmental research projects examining the longer-term outcome of mood disorders and interventions to increase the likelihood of response and remission. Her research interests include cognitive and functional recovery in mood disorders, women's mental health and consultation liaison psychiatry. Kate is the co-convenor of fourth year medical student teaching in Older Persons Health.

Olivia joined the Christchurch Health and Development study as the Data Manager at the start of 2025. Her role is focused on enforcing policies to ensure study data is secure, accurate, and accessible. Olivia is working to increase research outputs by migrating legacy data to a secure data portal, enabling the data to be more visible to researchers.

Jess works across the Departments of Population Health and Psychological Medicine. She trained in health psychology and worked in Australia for several years before returning to NZ. Her research interests include psychiatric epidemiology, later life outcomes associated with child and adolescent mental and physical health, intervention targets to reduce premature mortality, and non-communicable disease epidemiology and global health.

Nathan completed his PhD on the CHDS in 2023. His doctoral work used network analysis to investigate mental health problems as complex systems. Since graduating, he has worked in Māori/Indigenous health research, primarily looking at physical health inequities for Māori living with psychosis. He is passionate about health equity and informing health improvement through data.

David was appointed by Professor Fred Shannon, in 19??. His principal research interests lay in the design analysis and interpretation of correlational data. He retired in 2015 and sadly passed away in 2018.

John was the lead biostatistician for the Study from 1977, the very start, until he retired in 2021. His research interests were psychosocial development in adolescence and young adulthood.