Highlighted Sessions

Dr. Niamh Mullins is Assistant Professor of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. She is a member of the Departments of Psychiatry and Genetics and Genomic Sciences, and the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine. Her lab conducts large-scale computational genomic studies of psychiatric disorders, with a focus on suicide and bipolar disorder. She received her PhD in Statistical Genetics from King's College London, and she is Co-chair of the Suicide Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium.

Enrique Baca-Garcia is  Chair of the Department of Psychiatry of the Fundación Jimenez Diaz Hospital (Madrid, Spain) that has a catchment area close to a million people. He’s is Profesor Titular at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.

He has published more than 240 peer reviewed papers, most of them about suicide behaviour.

Dr. Hanga Galfalvy is a biostatistician with joint appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Department of Biostatistics at Columbia University in New York, where she is currently an Associate Professor of Clinical Biostatistics (in Psychiatry).  She has collaborated on many observational and treatment studies of suicidal behavior, as well as other psychiatric illnesses. Her methodological interests include predictive models for suicide and suicide attempts, analysis of longitudinal data from high-frequency data collections,  and the analysis of high-dimensional psychiatric genetics data.

Dr. Philippe Mortier, M.D. Ph.D., is a psychiatrist and statistician by training (KU Leuven University, Belgium), and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Health Services Research Group, part of the Epidemiology and Public Health Program of the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) Barcelona, Spain. He is associated with the Centre for Public Health Psychiatry, KU Leuven University, Belgium, and is a member of CIBER in Epidemiology and Public Health (CIBERESP), the largest public health research network in Spain.

Dr. Mortier’s research fields are psychiatric epidemiology and suicide research. He is currently focusing on the development of data-driven Clinical Decision Support Systems for the assessment of suicide risk, using data from the Catalonia Suicide Risk Code Epidemiology Study (codirisc.org), a population-representative nested case-control study of suicide attempts in Catalonia, Spain. He is also an active collaborator in the MIND/COVID project (mindcovid.org), a series of prospective cohort studies aiming to provide representative and actionable epidemiological knowledge on adverse mental health outcomes, including suicidal thoughts and behaviors, during the Spain COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Mortier is part of the WHO World Mental Health International College Student Initiative (https://www.hcp.med.harvard.edu/wmh/college_student_survey.php), a multidisciplinary network of over 150 international leading researchers, where he conducts research on suicidal thoughts and behaviors among college students.

Olivia Kirtley is a Research Foundation Flanders Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Center for Contextual Psychiatry at KU Leuven in Belgium, where she leads “SIGMA”, a large-scale longitudinal study of adolescent mental health and development using experience sampling methods (ESM). Olivia completed her PhD in psychological medicine within the Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory at the University of Glasgow in 2016, on the topic of emotional and physical pain in individuals who think about and engage in self-harm. Her current research uses ESM to investigate dynamic processes involved in ideation-to-action transitions in adolescents who self-harm, with a focus on social processes and future thinking. Her recent work has focused on mapping psychological factors involved in suicide among people with chronic pain, as well as exploring practical, clinical issues with using machine learning for suicide research and prevention. Olivia leads several projects aimed at increasing transparency and reproducibility in clinical psychology research, including designing a pre-registration template for experience sampling research and leading the ESM Item Repository. Olivia also co-chairs the International Association for Suicide Prevention Early Career Group.

Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, MD, PhD, is associate professor and head of the Unit Suicide Research & Mental Health Promotion at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. His team has coined the Papageno effect which describes suicide-protective potentials of media reporting. He has published more than 150 articles in the area of suicide prevention and has received several grants for his research on media effects. He is the current Vice President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention, and chairman of the Wiener Werkstaette for Suicide Research , the interdisciplinary platform of suicide researchers in Austria (http://www.suizidforschung.at).