Zrinka Laido

Health
Analyst

Zrinka joined Praxis in 2021. Previously, she has gathered her experience in field of public health and research for almost 20 years, by working in different settings such as national public health authority (Croatian National Institute of Public Health), non-governmental research institution (Estonian-Swedish Mental Health and Suicidology Institute) and academic (Medical University of Vienna). To Praxis she came directly from the Medical University of Vienna, where she worked as a researcher. Already at the beginning of her career, she focused her research and curiosity towards identifying risk factors for disease development among vulnerable groups (youth) and propose measures for disease prevention at community level.

From 2008, Zrinka has been more involved in the field of mental health, epidemiology of suicidal behaviour, mental health promotion, suicide prevention, and influence of media report on topic of terrorism and suicide on mental health.

Zrinka has experience in randomized controlled trial, cross-sectional study and analysing both quantitative and qualitative data. In addition, she was part of the team that tested compliance of media reports about terrorist attacks to media recommendations about mass shootings. Her recent tasks included content analysis of media reports, development of the coding system for the analysis, but also analysing how Covid-19 has influenced mental health of general population. Overview of Zrinka ´s Publications is available here.

Zrinka graduated medicine in Medical School University of Zagreb. Due to the curiosity toward population and community health, she had chosen epidemiology as the medical residency. She obtained her certificate in epidemiology after 3 years of residency that comprised of a comprehensive training for epidemiological work in the field of communicable, non-communicable diseases, nutrition, food safety, mental health and health promotion. Today she still remembers the words from her mentor at that time, who was a specialist in communicable disease epidemiology, who said that time of epidemics are ahead of us (it was 20 years before the COVID-19!), and how important is to have necessary number of medical doctors working in public health field. From 2015, Zrinka attends PhD study in Applied Medical Sciences at Medical University of Vienna and her doctoral thesis on topic „Aspects of suicide epidemiology“, is in the progress.

Zrinka is fluent in Croatian (mother tongue), English, German and Estonian, can also converse in Italian, as well as basic Russian knowledge.