Kathleen Pajer, MD, MPH, is a Professor of Psychiatry and formerly served as Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Ottawa and Chief of Psychiatry at CHEO. She currently serves as the Director of the CHEO Precision Child and Youth Mental Health (PCYMH) Collaboratory, supported by generous donor funding in a partnership with SickKids. Additionally, she is the Clinical and Scientific Director of Project ECHO Ontario: Child and Youth Mental Health.
Dr. Pajer spent the majority of her career in the United States as a clinician scientist, focusing on stress response system function in adolescent girls with behavioral disturbances. Since her recruitment to Canada in 2011 to Dalhousie University and in 2014 to the University of Ottawa, Dr. Pajer has taken on leadership roles in medical, clinical, and research domains. Her scientific focus has since shifted transforming the child and youth mental healthcare system.
She has received numerous grants and awards for her work, including the 2024 CHEO Research Institute’s Osmond Impact Award, recognizing individuals who have significantly advanced the CHEO Research Institute’s growth over the past year.
Related News
Research Projects
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Impact of a publicly-funded pharmacare program on prescription stimulant use among children and youth: A population-based observational natural experiment.
27/10/2023
Prescription drug coverage is a less well-studied determinant of medication access among individuals with ADHD. In one US study, children without insurance were less likely to be prescribed stimulants than those with private or public insurance. Similarly, a separate US study found that most stimulant prescriptions were paid through commercial insurance, with copayments required for nearly two-thirds of prescriptions dispensed. Therefore, disparities in insurance status may be an important source of inequity in treatment for children and youth with ADHD, favouring individuals with private insurance and the financial resources to cover out-of-pocket costs. This assertion is supported by findings from research associating higher income with a greater likelihood of stimulant treatment and lower treatment rates in children with ADHD from low-income families despite being at least as likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for this condition as high-income children.
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Electronic health records identify timely trends in childhood mental health conditions.
14/09/2023
Our interdisciplinary team of experts in informatics and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry collaborated in assessing the utilization of available, aggregated, standardized EHR data in identifying and tracking the full diagnostic spectrum of MH disorders/symptoms and exposure to ACEs, over time, across multiple sites and identifying groups at risk by year and demographics. This study necessitated the development of an EHR-based pediatric MH condition typology that expanded on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by including Intentional Self-Harm, Catatonia, Encephalopathies, Standalone Symptoms, Tic Disorders, added exposure to ACEs, and that took into account the 2015 U.S. healthcare transition to the International Classifications of Diseases (ICD-10) [13]. This involved assembling clinical codes representing single diagnoses and symptoms from the Systematized Nomenclature of Medical Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) [14, 15] which were then cross-mapped to ICD-9 [16] and ICD-10 [17] and checked for omission, commissions and alignment with DSM-5 [18].
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Circadian cortisol secretion in adolescent girls with conduct disorder
07/11/2022
This study advanced our knowledge about girls with severe antisocial behavior, discovering that lower circadian cortisol secretion is present in girls with CD, but largely due to decreased volume of cortisol secretion between awakening and 30-minutes post-awakening time. Comorbid internalizing disorders were not associated with differences in circadian secretion of cortisol, compared to girls with only CD.
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A stochastic optimization approach for staff scheduling decisions at inpatient units
26/10/2022
In this paper, we propose an optimization scheme in order to schedule the operations of the orthopedic surgery division at Habib Bourguiba University Hospital. This type of planning could be performed for a general problem of scheduling “n” operations in “m” operating rooms and “b” recovery beds with the conditions that: m ⩽ b, longer operation takes longer recovery time and no wait as much as possible between the operating room and the recovery room.
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Peripheral and neural correlates of self-harm in children and adolescents: a scoping review
04/05/2022
Our scoping review demonstrates that this corpus of research is not sufficiently mature for a meta-analysis to identify potential biomarkers. Many conflicting results are reported for the 28 specific correlates. Interpretation of the divergent results is hampered by methods that may have produced biased findings and samples mainly generalizable to clinical populations and girls. Most of the work was done in adolescents, not children younger than 11 years.