Leithwood Award: Dylan Johnson on mental health, pandemics, and his ‘methodological toolkit’

For the first time since 2015, the Leithwood Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis has named co-recipients.

The award, usually presented to one recipient annually in recognition of exceptional, cutting-edge research conducted by an OISE student in the last phase of their doctoral work, is being shared. This year, Dr. Sheena Bell and Dr. Dylan Johnson have been recognized by the selection committee.

“To select two winners for the award is unusual but to see that it’s a shared honour speaks to the tremendous breadth of research being undertaken by our OISE community members,” said Professor Becky Chen, Associate Dean, Research, Partnership and Innovation. “On behalf of OISE, I wish to congratulate Dr. Bell and Dr. Johnson for this tremendous honour.”

The award is named in honour of Dr. Kenneth Leithwood, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Leadership, Higher & Adult Education and former Associate Dean, Research. His research on educational leadership and educational change contributed to shaping theory, policy and practice in most jurisdictions in Canada, England, the United States, and Australia.

To read more about Dr. Bell’s story, visit here.

Dr. Dylan Johnson’s journey towards completing his award-winning dissertation started in the emergency room.

While completing a Masters in Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa, he was working in the emergency department at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario doing data collection. “It was just data collection, but it still had a clinical flavour to it – because I was interviewing adolescents about experiences with self-injury and their mental health,” he said. “It was a pivotal moment that inspired me to pursue a career focused on making a meaningful impact in the lives of children and youth.”

He enjoyed the intersection between epidemiology and bigger picture issues within healthcare – but also the person-to-person experience of the system. “As things evolved, I started thinking more and more about how what we call mental health, in many ways, is really how that macro level gets downloaded onto individual people,” said Johnson, currently a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University. 

At the heart of Johnson’s academic ethos is an unending curiosity for both objective and subjective realities. “Having that curiosity to understand what this thing is we call reality – that more material, objective sense – where you understand the systems, the objective realities people live and their material conditions,” he said, “but also subjective experience – which is where mental health fits in.”

So, his Leithwood Award-winning paper “Adversity, Resiliency, and Mental Health during the COVID-19 Pandemic” reflects on each of those inquiries. His thesis examined how early-life adversity and resilience shape mental health vulnerability during large-scale societal disruption – with the pandemic serving as a naturalistic test case.

After earning a master’s at OISE – in School and Clinical Child Psychology – in 2021, Johnson rolled into his doctoral studies well equipped for the challenge of answering his doctoral question. Dr. Mark Wade, Johnson’s doctoral supervisor, thought that he arrived in the program already “very seasoned” as a researcher – bringing in his experiences in epidemiology, especially that at Canada’s Department of National Defense.

“However, his skills and confidence grew immensely while in the lab, where he developed a methodological and analytical toolkit that is unlike most grad students I have ever met,” said Wade, himself a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor in OISE’s Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development. “Not only is he a very gifted quantitative researcher, he is skilled at science communication and research translation. As a trained clinician, he is working directly at the intersection of research and practice, which affords him a unique perspective and capacity to grapple with and integrate these two domains towards the goal of supporting vulnerable children and their families.”

“I have not seen a graduate student as productive as Dylan in my entire time as a professor. He is undeniably an academic star, and one whose future appears very bright.”

Drawing on family-based, longitudinal, and nationally representative data, and consisting of three independent but conceptually integrated studies with large datasets collected during the pandemic, he found that early-life adversity and pandemic-related stress exerts additional effects on one’s mental health (across multiple outcomes). 

And, compassionate, kind childhood experiences and social supports offer some protection against elevated mental health risk.

While much of the research findings were consistent with what Johnson hypothesized, he was remarked by the daunting effects the pandemic had – how society is prepared (or unprepared) for large scale disruption. 

“I think there was a disconcerting feeling initially that this is how quickly things can drop off and shift,” he said. “Not as an indictment of anyone, but this lack of preparedness as a society that was felt really early on. We learned so much from that.”

“Hopefully, that's what all of our research together really shows,” he added, “that there's this need to not just create a plane mid-flight, but have these things [mental health resources and the like] ready from the outset, because these things happen where we have a historical precedent.”

Wade sees Johnson’s thesis and scholarship having a tremendous impact in the field of developmental and clinical psychology. “In this space, he has contributed substantially to our knowledge about the impact of early adversity and stress on the wellbeing of children and their parents,” he said. 

For Wade, this includes different dimensions of early adversity such as abuse and neglect, and the unique impact of COVID-related stress, on the mental health and cognitive functioning of children and youth. 

With Johnson’s work already widely cited and published in top international journals, the work is relevant in determining how best to respond to the needs of children but also how to support families in a world of increasing uncertainty. 

“His work is extremely rigorous, thoughtful, and practically relevant to those working with children – including educators, parents, and clinicians – as they attempt to support young people impacted by early adversity in its many forms,” Wade said.

And so, the Leithwood Award is a step on the way for Johnson’s body of work – to a place where he can advocate, not just research, for children and families.

“I think helping to kind of instill that sensibility that I think clinicians should have,” he said. “It's easy to fall into reductive places of how we think about human behavior in general. It's very complex, and there's a multiplicity of factors involved in why people do what they do, or end up, how they end up.” 

“I think it's a good opportunity to be able to bring that into your research, and then, eventually as I get further into my career, hopefully doing more advocacy work – whether that's through research or through organizations.”