The inaugural Wellcome Mental Health Data Prize – unlocking innovation in mental health science
Anxiety and depression are already among the biggest causes of disability in the world and rising, but we still know very little about what makes a difference when preventing, managing and treating these conditions. Wellcome wants to change that by increasing scientific understanding and developing new and improved early interventions.
Dr. Catherine Sebastian, Head of Evidence for Mental Health, Wellcome
In 2022 Wellcome commissioned Social Finance to design and deliver its first Mental Health Data Prize.
Over two years, the inaugural programme brought together researchers, data scientists and young people from the UK and South Africa to unlock the potential of existing mental health data and to find new insights into anxiety and depression in young people.
The Prize aimed to support first-time innovators to develop scalable digital tools for the mental health research community.
Social Finance set up a Youth Advisory Network to ensure young people with lived experience of anxiety and depression from the UK and South Africa played a central role in shaping the programme. Members influenced key decisions throughout, from its design to the assessment of applications.
The Data Prize provided a combination of innovation funding and tailored support to set teams up for success in developing their tool. The prize was split into three phases:
- Discovery phase: 10 teams received £40,000 across this phase to analyse existing data to answer their research question
- Prototyping phase: five teams received a further £100,000 funding to develop a tool for mental health research
- Sustainability phase: £500,000 was allocated across three winning teams to develop their prototype
The teams were supported to develop their tool or application with:
- Group workshops and expert surgeries
- Team mentoring and tailored support
- Workshops on how to integrate lived experience throughout the development process
- Opportunities for connection, collaboration and knowledge sharing with a diverse network of experts across mental health science and related fields
So often research can be quite slow – it can take years until you get a paper published. So the Data Prize gives you a chance to get something very tangible quite quickly, and you can see how it develops and how it grows.
Dr Bettina Moltrecht, Principal Research Fellow, University College London, winner as part of the Harmony team
Data Prize winners 2022 — 2024
Three of the ten shortlisted teams went on to develop tools that are now being used by mental health researchers and policy makers.
Following the success of the first Mental Health Data Prize, Wellcome commissioned Social Finance to design and deliver a UK-focused Prize in 2026.
Harmony
In simple terms, without the data prize, our tool (Harmony) wouldn’t exist. Beyond simply providing funds for the tool, there was a huge focus on skills development throughout the program which meant we were able to effectively develop the product and begin to build a solid user base.
Dr Eoin McElroy, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Ulster University
Harmony is a free-to-use AI tool for researchers to make better use of existing mental health questionnaire data, by bringing together different studies.
It was developed as a collaboration between Ulster University, University College London, the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria and Fast Data Science as part of the Wellcome Data Prize in Mental Health and is co-led by Dr Bettina Moltrecht at UCL and Dr Eoin McElroy at Ulster University.
For the Harmony team, the Data Prize enabled successful development of the tool and connection with key sector stakeholders. The Data Prize was a novel form of funding, compared to traditional research grants, that encouraged rapid development of a tangible tool and development opportunities for early career researchers.
The team: Eoin McElroy, Bettina Moltrecht, Thomas Wood, Mauricio Scopel Hoffmann, George B. Ploubidis.
Watch the video to find out more about how Harmony put their team together.
DigiCAT
There isn’t a lot of funding available that specifically supports digital tools for mental health science research and so it’s been a really good opportunity to realise our vision … And I can’t wait to see what people come up with, what exciting ideas for digital tools there are out there.
Prof Aja Murray, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh; Co-founder of DigiCAT; member of the Expert Advisory Group for the Mental Health Data Prize 2026–2028
DigiCAT (Digital Counterfactual Analysis Tool) is a digital tool that analyses cause and effect in observational mental health data. This can accelerate progress in identifying potential intervention targets.
Beyond the Data Prize, the team has worked with the Department for Education through an Impact Acceleration Award, specifically with the School Exclusions Unit and the Serious Violence Unit, and upskilled individuals across the sector in insights gathered about what works, and does not work, in addressing mental health problems.
The team: Aja Murray, Marie Allitt, Ingrid Obsuth, Josiah King, Dan Mirman, Patrick Errington and Helen Wright.
Find out more about DigiCAT from Aja Murray below:
School Health Research Network (SHRN)
The School Health Research Network’s (SHRN) school-level digital dashboard is a digital tool which that schools to analyse and interpret data about their school environment and pupil wellbeing. It empowers schools to use bespoke data to create environments that promote good mental and physical health.
The tool will be nationally rolled out to secondary schools in Wales to enable schools to have access to dashboards to identify needs of pupils. The team also undertook further research and an academic paper is due to be published soon. Alongside this, the team have had opportunities to share their experience and insights with researchers and practitioners in other countries.
The team: Jeremy Segrott, Hayley Reed, Frances Rice, Simon Murphy, Rhys Bevan-Jones, Yulia Shenderovich, Olga Eyre, Nicholas Page, Maria Boffey and Edna Ogada.
See an overview of the SHRN tool below: