joseph sexton

about me

curriculum vitae
twitter / bluesky / linkedin

hey! I made this website to compile my research (and because I had a deal for wordpress + a domain). Over time I hope to also feature some personal writing and maybe creative projects.

In May 2023 I graduated from Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee, USA), where I triple-majored in cognitive studies, mathematics, and medicine, health, and society. As a student, I focused my time on research and mental health advocacy. I was awarded the nationally renowned Goldwater Scholarship for promise as a future scientist, and I was named the JED Foundation’s 2022 Student Voice of Mental Health, given to one undergraduate per year for outstanding efforts for change and advocacy in the mental health space. In 2022 I founded and directed the Vanderbilt Critical Psychiatry Conference — in 2023, the more wide-reaching Conference on Critical Psychiatry — which convened speakers from varied professional, lived, and disciplinary backgrounds for cross-cutting conversations on mental health. These conferences accrued over 700 online visitors. Within the Nashville community, Mental Health America of the MidSouth selected me as their 2022 Volunteer of the Year, and I’ve also met with state and federal legislators as part of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s TN Policy Committee.

After graduating, I was awarded a Keegan Traveling Fellowship, a grant offered to a handful of Vanderbilt seniors annually. With this support, from September 2023 through December 2024, I traveled to a dozen countries, spending several weeks to two months in each, meeting with clinicians, researchers, and service users to better understand cultural and political dimensions influencing the construction of mental health. Some especially exciting locations I visited include Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis capital of the world; Harare, renowned for its community mental health approaches; London, home to the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital; and Trieste, where Italy’s continued psychiatric deinsitutionalization was formalized.

Since finishing my fellowship, I returned to Vanderbilt to work as a postbaccalaureate research technician under Dr. Ashley Watts. I work on methods-intensive work to help characterize the structure of the DSM-5’s substance use disorder criterion set. My projects leverage latent variable models (in structural equation and item response frameworks) to challenge prior assumptions of the criterion set’s excellent fit.

In the future, I hope to pursue a PhD advancing understanding of suicide, mental health, and psychiatric classification. I am especially interested in how psychologists measure psychopathology and the implications of such decisions.