Highlighted Sessions

Dr. Blumberg is the John and Hope Furth Professor of Psychiatric Neuroscience, Professor of Psychiatry, Diagnostic Radiology and in the Child Center, and Director of the Mood Disorders Research Program, at the Yale School of Medicine. Her research is devoted to understanding brain circuitry differences that underlie mood disorders across the lifespan and their high suicide risk. She directs the Mood Disorders Research Program at Yale that brings together a multi-disciplinary group of scientists to study genetic, neurodevelopmental and environmental factors to generate new methods for early detection, more effective interventions, and prevention of mood and associated disorders and suicide. She is a lead investigator of the Help Overcome and Prevent the Emergence of Suicide (HOPES) international research consortium. She has received numerous awards for her research on mood disorders and suicide including the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Colvin Prize and American Psychiatric Association Blanche F. Ittleson Award. She studied neuroscience as an undergraduate at Harvard University and completed her medical degree, psychiatry training and specialty training in neuroimaging at Cornell University Medical College prior to joining the Yale faculty in 1998.

Professor, Northern Clinical School, Faculty of Medicine and Health, University of Sydney
Head of Department of Psychiatry and Executive Director of CADE Clinic, Royal North Shore Hospital
President International Society for Bipolar Disorders
Editor Bipolar Disorders and Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry
Editorials Editor & Deputy British Journal of Psychiatry

Dr Malhi has more than 25 years of clinical experience in the diagnosis and management of depression and bipolar disorder and runs the CADE Clinic at Royal North Shore Hospital, Sydney, Australia that provides a state-wide specialist service for mood disorders. As an academic, he holds a full chair at The University of Sydney, and he is the President of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD) and the Editor of Bipolar Disorders – the leading journal in the field.

After gaining degrees in Medicine and Pharmacology from the University of Manchester in the UK, and specializing in psychiatry, initially in Cambridge and then at the The Bethlem and Maudsley Hospitals and The Institute of Psychiatry in London, Dr Malhi gained a doctorate from The University of NSW in Sydney, Australia. He is a Fellow both of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP), and for his services to the community, he has been the recipient of the RANZCP College Citation and now serves on the College Foundation. He is also a recipient of the Distinguished Professorial Achievement Award from The University of Sydney Medical School.

In terms of research, Dr Malhi conducts neuroscientific studies that examine the neural basis of mood disorders and suicide, for which he has received the RANZCP Senior Researcher Award. He is also a sought-after lecturer and for contributions to teaching and education he has been a recipient of the ISBD Mogens Schou Award. Over his career he has published more than 600 papers and 20 books and book chapters and has been formally recognized by Clarivate as a highly cited researcher (top 1%).

Niamh Mullins is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Psychiatric Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research involves conducting large-scale genetic studies of suicide outcomes and bipolar disorder in the International Suicide Genetics Consortium and the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. She obtained her PhD in statistical genetics from King’s College London.

Gustavo Turecki MD PhD is a clinician scientist whose work focuses on understanding brain molecular changes that occur in major depression and suicide, as well as molecular processes that explain treatment response. Dr. Turecki is Full Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. He is the Scientific Director of the Douglas Institute and the Director of the McGill Group for Suicide Studies, a multidisciplinary suicide research group (www.mgss.ca) that comprises the Douglas Bell-Canada Brain Bank (www.douglasbrainbank.ca). Dr. Turecki has conducted pioneering research which has led to our understanding of how traumatic life experiences impacts brain gene function and increases long-term risk for suicide by epigenetically regulating critical genes involved in stress responses and behavioral development.

 

 

 

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.

Gregory Simon MD MPH is an investigator at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute and a psychiatrist in Kaiser Permanente’s Behavioral Health Service.  He is also a Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington.  Dr. Simon completed residency training in internal medicine at the University of Washington, residency training in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and fellowship training in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program at the University of Washington.  Dr. Simon’s research focuses on improving access to and quality of mental health care, especially for mood disorders and people at risk for self-harm and suicide.  Specific areas of research include improving adherence to medication, increasing the availability of effective psychotherapy, personalization of treatment for mood disorders, evaluating peer support by and for people with mood disorders, prediction of suicidal behavior, population-based suicide prevention programs.  Dr. Simon currently leads the Mental Health Research Network, an NIMH-funded cooperative agreement supporting population-based mental health research across 14 large health systems.

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.

Barbara Stanley, PhD is a Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University and Director of the Suicide Prevention Training, Implementation and Evaluation (SP-TIE) program in the Center for Practice Innovations at New York State Psychiatric Institute. She is also a Research Scientist in the Division of Molecular Imaging and Neuropathology at New York State Psychiatric Institute. Her research focuses on all aspects of suicidal behavior, non-suicidal self-injury and borderline personality disorder including assessment and intervention with suicidal individuals, clinical factors relevant to suicidal behavior and self-injury, and neurobiological and biobehavioral influences on suicidal behavior. Dr. Stanley also oversees the development of suicide prevention training for clinicians throughout New York State. With her colleague, Dr. Gregory Brown, she developed the Safety Planning Intervention that is used throughout the United States and internationally. Dr. Stanley has authored > 250 publications, is editor-in-chief of the Archives of Suicide Research journal and president-elect of the International Academy of Suicide Research.

Professor Phillips is a Canadian psychiatrist who has been a permanent resident of China for over 30 years. He is currently Director of the Suicide Research and Prevention Center at the Shanghai Mental Health Center, Professor of Psychiatry at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Executive Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Research and Training in Suicide Prevention at Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Columbia University, and co-chair of the Lancet Commission on Mental Health in China. He coordinates multi-center collaborative projects on suicide, depression and schizophrenia; runs research training courses for Chinese and foreign graduate students; promotes increased awareness of the importance of addressing China’s suicide problem; and advocates improving the quality, comprehensiveness and access to mental health services around the country. In 2013 he received China’s highest honor for scientific achievement for foreign nationals and in 2014 he received the Order of Canada.

Danuta Wasserman (DW) is a psychiatrist and Univ. Prof. Dr. Med. in Psychiatry and Suicidology at Karolinska Institutet (KI), and the current Director and Founding Head of the
National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention of Mental Ill-Health (NASP) at KI, since 1993. DW has been appointed as the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research, Methods Development and Training in Suicide Prevention since 1997 and assists in the development of mental health promotion and suicide preventive programs on five continents. She is the former President of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) and the International Academy of Suicide Research (IASR). She is serving on the Board of the EPA and presently Chairs the Committee on Ethics. DW was the Chair and is presently the Co-Chair of the Suicidology Section at the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). She is also a member of the planning committee of the WPA. DW was elected President-Elect for the WPA 2020. DW is the former Chair of the Public Health Sciences Department at KI and developed masters and PhD programs for candidates in low- and middle-income countries, as well as mental health care programs for clinical psychiatrists with a focus on psychiatric disorders and suicide. DW is an Expert Advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) for the Mental Health Gap Action (mhGAP) Programme which operates in low- and middle-income countries to improve services for neurological, mental and substance use disorders. She serves as an expert to UNICEF programme on mental health among adolescents at the population level and in the Helping Adolescents Thrive (HAT) programme, aimed at developing guidelines on mental health promotion and preventive interventions for adolescents in collaboration with WHO. DW provides technical support to the WHO member states and has projects in central and eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America as well as United States and Australia. Professor Wasserman is the Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK, Honorary Member of the Hungarian Psychiatric Association and Honorary President of Estonian Swedish Mental Health Institute. She served as an international advisor to the Japanese Society
of Psychiatry and Neurology.
DW has won numerous national and international honors and awards, including the Public Health Prize from the Nordic Council of Ministers of Health for the outstanding contribution to public mental health research and prevention, the Distinguished Research Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Research (AFSP), the Hans Rost Prize from the German Association for Suicide Prevention for the outstanding contribution to suicide research and prevention, the Stengel Research Award for outstanding contributions in the field of suicide research and prevention from the International Association for Suicide Prevention and Crisis Intervention (IASP), and from the British Medical Association (BMC) Board of Science Award for the Public Understanding of Science for her book Depression: the facts published by Oxford University Press. DW is recipient of the H M The King’s of Sweden gold medal. DW is the author of numerous scientific articles, reports and book chapters. She is the editor of the Oxford Textbook of Suicidology and Suicide Prevention: A Global Perspective, published by Oxford University Press in 2009 which is updated and new edition 2020 is in press. Her comprehensive book for busy clinicians and the broad audience interested in suicide prevention “Suicide an unnecessary death” published by Martin Dunitz (2001), has been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Russian and updated for a new edition by the Oxford University Press (2016).
DW’s research activities comprise epidemiological, psychodynamic and genetic studies of suicidal behaviours. In 2009, she received the honour from the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, to organize the “Nobel Conference on the role of genetics in promoting suicide prevention and the mental health of the population.” She was responsible for organizing several national and international conferences in psychiatry and suicidology. DW is the Principle Investigator for large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCT), “Saving
and Empowering Young Lives in Europe (SEYLE)” and “Working in Europe to Stop Truancy Among Youth (WE-STAY),” assessing the effectiveness of different intervention approaches and prevention strategies for adolescents. Both RCTs are funded with €3 million each by the European Union (EU). DW leads also a large RCT in Sweden 2016 – 2020 involving 163 schools, with the aim to test the effectiveness of the mental health promoting, Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) program in comparison to a control group. DW is the Swedish sitecoordinator of the NEVERMIND RCT-project (NEurobehavioral predictiVE and peRsonalized Modeling of depressIve symptoms duriNg primary somatic Disorders through ICT-enabled, self-management procedures) and POTION, an RCT studying promotion of social interaction through emotional body odours. Both projects are funded during 2017-2023 by the European Union, Horizon 2020 Framework program.
Since 2000, she serves as the Principle Investigator for the Genetic Investigation of Suicide and Attempted Suicide Project (GISS project), funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Research Foundation in Sweden. DW serves as a scientific consultant to Columbia University, Texas University and Montana State University in the United States.
Professor Wasserman is also the chair and a member of several national and international working groups on mental health promotion and suicide prevention.

I am a psychiatrist with over 30 years of clinical experience in treating patients who have attempted suicide and their families. I initially received my training and began my career in the Budapest Crisis Intervention Center in Hungary. I currently work as a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, and serve as the Secretary of the International Academy of Suicide Research. My experience in research on suicidal behavior spans conducting a psychological autopsy study, a suicide prevention program in primary care, interviewing practitioners who have lost patients by suicide, and conducting a long-term follow-up study on risk and protective factors for late-life suicide. In most countries in the world, suicide rates are highest among the elderly. The biological, cultural, and psychosocial underpinnings of this increased suicide rate in late life are not well-known. To be able investigate this, I founded the Longitudinal Research Program in Late-Life Suicide in Pittsburgh (gsuicide.pitt.edu). Traditionally recognized suicide risk factors give insight about who might be contemplating suicide but do not reliably identify those who transition from contemplation to suicidal behavior. Moreover, most studies do not consider the heterogeneity of suicide attempters. This inspired us to identify previously unrecognized suicide risk factors.  We use cognitive assessments and develop game theory experiments, and decision process measures to understand how cognition and decision-making contribute to suicide risk.  We found that some of these risk factors mark life-long vulnerabilities and help to understand pathways to suicidal behavior across the life span, while some are age-specific, and hinder adaptation to age-related stressors. We are longitudinally following a population of adults at very high risk for suicide--those with depression and a history of suicide attempt or ideation. We aim to prospectively identify biomarkers in addition to clinical characteristics that put this group at risk.

 

Professor Lars Mehlum MD PhD is the founding director of the National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the immediate past president of the International Academy of Suicide Research (IASR) and the, European Society for the Study of Personality Disorders (ESSPD) and the past president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP). With his research group he focuses on the clinical studies of people with suicidal and self-harming behaviour and mental health problems such as personality disorders and the efficacy of treatments and interventions. He has also conducted studies of the epidemiology of self-harm and completed suicide in the general population and various non-clinical samples through large scale national registers. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and has received several national and international awards.

Vladimir Carli, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention (NASP), at Karolinska Institutet (KI). He is Co-Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research, Training and Methods Development in Suicide Prevention and Treasurer of the International Academy for Suicide Research (IASR). VC’s current main areas of interest are in the field of e-delivery of suicide preventive interventions, development and evaluation of interventions for young people, development of collaborative online tools for researchers in Suicidology, development of statistical methods for the evaluation of suicide risk. VC is Principal Investigator at Karolinska Institute for the HORIZON2020 Future and Emerging Technologies Research projects NEVERMIND (Neurobehavioural  Predictive  and  Personalised Modelling  of  Depressive  Symptoms  during  Primary Somatic  Diseases  with  ICT-enabled  Self-management Procedures) and EXPERIENCE (The “Extended-Personal  Reality”: Augmented Recording   and   Transmission of Virtual Senses through Artificial-Intelligence).

Liang Zhou MD is a professor of psychiatry at the Affiliated Brain Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China. After got his MD at Central South University at 2003, he had worked at the School of Public Health, Central South University from 2003 to 2016. Now he is the vice dean of School of Mental Health at Guangzhou Medical University. The main research interests of Dr. Zhou include suicide prevention and research in rural older adults in China, alcohol use problems, and community mental health. He has published over 40 papers and 10 books and chapters in both English and Chinese.

Dr. Brian Ahmedani received his PhD and MSW degrees from Michigan State University (MSU). Dr. Ahmedani also completed a NIH / NIDA-funded fellowship program in Drug Dependence Epidemiology. He joined the Center for Health Policy and Health Services Research at Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) in 2010, and was appointed Director of the Center. His research interests are in the area of health services and interventions for individuals with mental health and substance use conditions, with particular expertise in suicide prevention. Currently, he is the HFHS Site-PI for the NIMH-funded Mental Health Research Network and the Health Systems Node of the NIDA Clinical Trials Network. He is PI/Co-PI for two large multi-site studies on suicide prevention – the first examining implementation of a telemedicine-based suicide prevention care pathway in the emergency room and the second evaluating implementation of the Zero Suicide Model across multiple US health systems. He is also Co-PI for the Trans-America Consortium of the NIH All of Us Research Program, and serves as Co-I on several other projects on suicide prevention. Dr. Ahmedani has been appointed to, and elected chair of, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s Suicide Prevention Commission for a term commencing April 3, 2020 and expiring April 2, 2024.

Ann Marie White is the Executive Director of the Children’s Institute and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center. In her university faculty roles, she leads change initiatives to deepen community engagement and public health approaches to health promotion via service, education and research. Her research interests focus on system science methods in the application of community engagement in research, mental health promotion, as well as suicide and violence prevention systems in communities.

Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University; Consultant Psychiatrist with Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.  For more than 40 years he and his research group have been conducting investigations concerning the causes, treatment, prevention and outcome of suicidal behaviour. He has published more than 600 papers and chapters and 15 books. He has received the following awards: Stengel Research Award from the International Association for Suicide Prevention; Dublin Career Research Award from the American Association of Suicidology; Research Award of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention; Life Achievement Award presented at the European Symposium of Suicide & Suicidal Behaviour in Israel; Morselli Medal from the International Academy for Suicide Research; Finnish Psychiatric Association Medal. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2020 he was given a CBE in the Queen for services to suicide prevention. Professor Hawton has a particular interest in epidemiology and clinical management of self-harm, suicide and self-harm in adolescents, media influences on self-harm and evaluation of suicide prevention initiatives.

 

Erkki Isometsä, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He started research in the national psychological autopsy study of the National Suicide Prevention Project in Finland and the WHO/Euro Study of Parasuicide Helsinki site, thereafter serving in 1997-2004 as the Head of the Mood Disorders and Suicide Research Unit at the National Public Health Institute. More recently, his research has focused on the general population and clinical epidemiology of mood disorders, their risk factors, illness mechanisms, course, outcome, treatment, and associated disability and suicidal behavior. He has led major longitudinal research projects, including the Vantaa Depression Study (VDS), the Vantaa Primary Care Depression Study (PC-VDS), and the Jorvi Bipolar Study (JoBS). His current research includes register-based national studies of suicide, and clinical risk factors studies of suicidal behavior in mood disorders. He leads clinical trials, studies of neurocognition and emotional processing, and experience sampling and mobile monitoring of mood disorders and suicidal behavior.

Professor Isometsä chairs the national Finnish depression treatment guidelines and is a member of the bipolar and suicide prevention guideline task forces. He served as the Secretary & Treasurer the International Academy of Suicide Research (IASR) in 2011-14, and is Finland’s country representative in the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP). He is active in International Society for Bipolar Disorders (ISBD), and the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP), and has other expert roles including memberships in editorial boards. By May 2018, he had authored or co-authored 230 original studies, plus 134 reviews, textbook chapters, or editorials; in the Scopus, his publications had been cited 10 814 times (h-index 55). In 2014, he was granted the Nordic Prize in Medicine.

Annette Erlangsen PhD is an Associate Professor and Head of program at the Danish Research Institute for Suicide Prevention in Denmark. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, USA and Honorary Associated Professor at the Centre for Mental Health Research, Australian National University, Australia.

Dr. Erlangsen is currently the Secretary General of International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP). She is also the national representative for Denmark as well as co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Suicide in Older Adults for the same organisation. In Denmark, she is a member of the National Partnership for Suicide Prevention. In addition, she is member of the Editorial Board of Lancet Psychiatry, Crisis, and Suicidology Online. In 2014 she was awarded the Alexander Gralnick Award from the American Association of Suicidology as well as the Danish Nordentoft Award and has earlier received the Young Lecturer Award at the European Symposium for Suicide and Suicidal Behaviour.

Dr. Erlangsen’s research interests within suicide prevention include high risk populations, older adults, bereaved by suicide, affected by suicide attempt, and psychosocial interventions and eHealth interventions. Her work has been published in numerous scientific journals, including Science, JAMA, BMJ, and Lancet.

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.

Prof. Yossi Levi-Belz is an expert in clinical psychology and suicide prevention. He is the founder & chair of the Lior Tsfaty Center for Suicide and Mental Pain Studies at Ruppin Academic Center in Israel. His research focuses on the psychological mechanisms of severe suicidal behavior as well as bereavement and growth processes among suicide survivors. He has authored more than 80 papers and book chapters on these topics. He serves as a board member in the National Association of Suicide Prevention and in the National Association of Suicide Survivors in Israel. In his work, he merges clinical work, research, and social activism with the goal of preventing suicide and providing relief to those people in need.

Dr. Schneck studies the way that people adapt to the suicide loss of a loved one. Specifically, his research aims to identify unconscious processes of coping with the loss that help people grow and adapt while also allowing them to remain engaged in current life demands. These unconscious processes are identified using a machine learning based and functional magnetic resonance brain imaging. The goal of this research is to ultimately develop treatments that target the unconscious mind and help people recover from this devastating form of loss.

Dr Kairi Kõlves is Associate Professor at the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention, and Co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research and Training in Suicide Prevention, School of Applied Psychology, Griffith University. She is also the Course Convenor of Master Courses of Suicidology. She has been working in suicide research and prevention since 1998. Prior to joining the AISRAP team in 2008, she worked at the Estonian-Swedish Mental Health and Suicidology Institute. Dr Kõlves has been involved in several Australian, Estonian and international projects and has published over 130 peer-reviewed papers, numerous reports and book chapters on suicide research and prevention. She is a member of different advisory committees.  In 2010 she was the recipient of the Australian LIFE Award in Emerging Researcher category, and in 2017 the Griffith Health Pro Vice Chancellor’s Research Excellence Award (Mid-Career Researcher).

Professor Jane Pirkis is the Director of the Centre for Mental Health at the University of Melbourne. She has worked in the suicide prevention field for nearly 25 years and has a particular interest in reporting and portrayal of suicide in news and entertainment media. Recently, she has conducted a number of studies considering how media-based interventions might be used in suicide prevention. She is a past Vice President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP), and was a founding co-Chair of IASP’s Suicide and the Media Special Interest Group. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Crisis, and the 2019 winner of the IASP Stengel Award for Outstanding Research in the Field of Suicide Prevention.

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).

Dr. Lakshmi Vijayakumar is the founder of SNEHA, an NGO in Chennai for the prevention of suicide. She is the Head, Department of Psychiatry, Voluntary Health Services, Adyar, Chennai. She is a member of the W.H.O’s International Network for Suicide Research and Prevention . She is an Honorary Associate Professor in the University of Melbourne, Australia. She has been conferred Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (FRCPsych), U.K. for her work on suicide prevention and also has been conferred FRCP (EDIN). She was awarded the Ringel Service award by IASP.

She has published widely in peer reviewed journals and has authored several chapters and edited two books. Her area of interest and expertise includes developing cost effective community intervention to prevent suicide.

Ellenor Mittendorfer-Rutz is Professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, where she is also Acting Head of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience. She further holds a Guest professorship at the Medical University in Vienna. Dr. Mittendorfer-Rutz is a board member of several international medical journals and research consortia. Her work responds to the complexity of research in suicidology and insurance medicine by conducting interdisciplinary and translational research, which spans from etiologic and prognostic to prevention and treatment research. Due to the rising number of refugees to Sweden and other European countries, her research has a specific focus on transcultural aspects. Studies are primarily based on nation-wide registers applying cutting-edge epidemiological methodology. Her work has led to several influential papers in high ranking medical journals such as The Lancet and JAMA Psychiatry.

Dr. Murad M Khan, MRCPsych, PhD is Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Psychiatry at the Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan and Associate Faculty at the Center for Bioethics & Culture (CBEC), Karachi.  He received his clinical and research training in the UK. He is a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists & obtained his PhD from King’s College, University of London.

Prof. Khan served as the President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) (2017-2020) (www.iasp.info) and during this period led the organisation’s global suicide prevention strategy. He has published widely on suicidal behavior in Pakistan and developing countries, focusing on epidemiology and socio-cultural and religious factors in suicide and self-harm.  He serves on the Board of several mental health organisations in Pakistan.

His other research and clinical interests include mental health of women and elderly, bioethics,  organisational ethics and narrative medicine.

Dr. Michael A. Lindsey is the Executive Director of the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at New York University (NYU), the Constance and Martin Silver Professor of Poverty Studies at NYU Silver School of Social Work, and an Aspen Health Innovators Fellow. At NYU McSilver, Dr. Lindsey leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners committed to creating new knowledge about the root causes of poverty, developing evidence-based interventions to address its consequences, and rapidly translating their findings into policy.

Additionally, he leads the working group of experts supporting the Congressional Black Caucus Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health, which created the report Ring the Alarm: The Crisis of Black Youth Suicide in America. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the National Academies of Practice (NAP) in Social Work, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals: 1) Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, (2) Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology; (3) Psychiatric Services; and (4) School Mental Health.

Dr. Lindsey holds a PhD in social work and MPH from the University of Pittsburgh, an MSW from Howard University, and a BA in sociology from Morehouse College.