Science of the Summit

Amy S. B. Bohnert, Ph.D., M.H.S., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan and also a mental health services researcher with the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Clinical Management Research (CCMR), an HSR&D Center of Innovation located in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is Co-Director of the joint University/VA Mental Health Innovations, Services, and Outcomes program. She obtained a PhD in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in health services research with CCMR. She has led a number of federally-funded projects related to addiction, overdose prevention, suicide, and prescription drug use. Dr. Bohnert has over 100 publications, including publications in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the British Medical Journal, and the American Journal of Psychiatry. She has also served in a scientific advisory role to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including as a member of the expert panel for the 2016 CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, to the Food and Drug Administration, and to the Michigan Prescription Drug and Opioid Abuse Task Force.

Guilherme Borges is a senior researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatria Ramon de la Fuente. He teaches epidemiology and is a mentor in programs at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). Dr. Borges served as a member of the Substance-Related Disorder Work Group for the DSM-5, the American Psychiatric Association, an Expert Group Core member in the Alcohol Use Expert Group, Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study and member of WHO Reference Group on Alcohol and Drug use Epidemiology.

His areas of expertise are alcohol and drugs and how they related to injuries and suicide, psychiatric nosology and mental health and the role of immigration. He has received several awards, including the “Jellinek Memorial Fund Award” (epidemiology, 2015). He has published about 378 journal articles and chapter books (92 on suicide). He was the co-chair of the committee which authored the “WHO Guidelines on the Identification and Management of Substance Use and Substance Use Disorders in Pregnancy (2014)”, an international contributor for the

“WHO- Preventing suicide: a global imperative (2014)”, contributor in “Drug use and road safety: a policy brief” (2016), participant in the “Report of the Second Technical Consultation on Drug Use and Road Safety” (2017) and “The health and social effects of nonmedical cannabis use”, all from the World Health Organization, 2016-17.

Mary Jean Coleman has been active in the field of suicide since 1979 when she lost her 17-year-old brother to suicide.  She is a Master Trainer for the internationally recognized safeTALK (Suicide Alertness for Everyone) program and is a certified safeTALK instructor.  She holds a master’s degree in Social Work from the State University of New York at Albany where she is certified as a Field Instructor for the School of Social Welfare.  She has presented extensively on the topic of suicide.

From January 2006 until her retirement this past December, Mary Jean worked for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention serving as the Senior Director, Southern Division, overseeing the Foundations activities across nine states.  Prior to this position Mary Jean was AFSP’s National Director of Field Programs where she was responsible for guiding AFSP chapters with suicide prevention programming; and as AFSP’s Regional Director in Upstate New York where she expanded AFSP’s reach by establishing and overseeing five new chapters.

Prior to her work with AFSP, for over 10 years Mary Jean worked as the Executive Director of a suicide prevention center.  Her work in community coalition building cultivated NYS advocacy efforts that lobbied for a federal agenda to declare suicide as a national public health problem.  As such she was a strong leader in the evolvement of the 1998 Surgeon Generals’ National Strategy: Goals and Objections for Action.

As a founding member of the NYS Council on Suicide Prevention and as leader on many NYS Regional Suicide Prevention Coalitions, Mary Jean worked in efforts to establish and implement the NYS Plan for Suicide Prevention.  She served as Board Chair for Suicide Intervention Skills Trainers in New York State and as such, she authored Suicide Survivors/Approaches and Special Populations in NYS’s Suicide Prevention and Public Health document.  Additionally, in 2005 she authored the Suicide Prevention Outreach and Response Facilitator Manual for the NYS Office of Mental Health.  Mary Jean was key advocate and grant writer in the work that eventually would establish the Suicide Prevention Center of New York State.

In 2006 she was honored by the NYS Mental Health Association for her lifetime achievements in the field; she received the 2008 Families Together lifetime achievement HOPE award for her work in youth suicide prevention, and in 2011 she was honored with the Suicide Prevention Center of New York State’s Hope and Life Award.  In 2012, she received the New York State Senate - Suicide Prevention, Advocacy and Leadership Award.

In 2016, Mary Jean lost her 33-year-old son, Tom, to untreated depression.  He died of a heroin overdose.

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.

Fabrice Jollant, MD PhD, is professor of psychiatry at Paris-Descartes University, attending psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris (France), and adjunct professor at McGill University (Canada). His research primarily focuses on the neurocognitive basis of suicidal acts. He has conducted a series of neuropsychology and neuroimaging studies in London (UK), Montpellier (France), Montreal (Canada), Nîmes (France) and now Paris. He is also the co-investigator, with anthropologist Charles Macdonald, of a research project among an indigenous group of the Philippines. More recently, he has collaborated on epidemiological studies based on French administrative databases and developed projects on the pharmacological treatment of suicidal ideas. He is the author of more than 90 peer-reviewed articles, a dozen book chapters, and a book for a French general audience. He is a member of the French National Observatory of Suicide, and the International Academy of Suicide Research.

 

Dr. Dombrovski studies decision processes in late-life suicidal behavior and in borderline personality.  His theoretical interests are in the exploration/exploitation dilemma and in elaborating a formal learning theory account of interpersonal dysfunction.  Dr. Dombrovski’s lab uses learning experiments, economic exchange games, functional neuroimaging, and computational modeling. Dr. Dombrovski directs two NIMH R01-supported studies: of reward learning in late-life suicidal behavior and of social decision-making in borderline personality disorder.  He is a co-investigator on a R01-funded longitudinal study of late-life suicide.  He takes care of patients with difficult-to-treat depression, borderline personality, and cognitive disorders, many of whom are at high risk for suicide.

Gustavo Turecki MD PhD is a clinician scientist whose work focuses on understanding brain molecular changes that occur in major depression and molecular processes that explain treatment response. In addition, his work aims to elucidate the neurobiological basis of the suicidal brain. 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). He is also the director of the FRQS Réseau québécois sur le suicide, les troubles de l'humeur et les troubles associés (www.reseausuicide.qc.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. He has authored over 450 publications, including research articles in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Neuroscience, Nature Medicine, and Lancet. His work has been cited 30,000 times and his contributions to the field have been recognized through 28 awards. He also serves, or has served, in the advisory boards of several scientific journals, and international scientific institutes.

Dr. Turecki is also an engaged clinician and heads the Depressive Disorders Program at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, where he treats patients with refractory major depressive disorder.

 

 

 

Jane Pearson, Ph.D., is the Special Advisor to the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) on Suicide Research.  She chairs the NIMH Suicide Research Consortium, and is the Associate Director for Preventive Interventions in the Division of Services and Intervention Research.  Dr. Pearson serves as the National Institutes of Health representative to the DHHS Federal Steering Group on Suicide Prevention, and leads the staffing for the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention Research Prioritization Task Force.

Catherine Glenn, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Rochester. Dr. Glenn’s research aims to advance understanding of the psychological processes that lead to suicide and self-injury in youth, to improve the ability to predict when youth are most at risk, and to leverage this knowledge to enhance interventions and preventions for these behaviors in youth. Her research uses a multimodal approach to examine the interplay among risk factors across self-report, behavioral, and psychophysiological units of analysis, in both cross-sectional and prospective designs. To support this work, Dr. Glenn has received grant funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Military Suicide Research Consortium, and the American Psychological Foundation.

Gregory Simon MD MPH is an investigator at Group Health Research Institute and a psychiatrist in Group Health’s Behavioral Health Service. He is also a Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington and Co-chair of the national scientific advisory board of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance. 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. Specific areas of research include improving adherence to medication, increasing the availability of effective psychotherapy, evaluating peer support by and for people with mood disorders, identifying and reducing risk of suicidal behavior, cost-effectiveness of treatment, and comorbidity of mood disorders with chronic medical conditions. Dr. Simon currently leads the Mental Health Research Network, an NIMH-funded cooperative agreement supporting population-based mental health research across 13 large health systems.

I am a neuroscientist, passionate about everything that might help mental health, from cells to phones, genes to jewellery, hip-hop to hippocampi. I research artificial intelligence, data science, ethics and governance, digital/clinical/music-based interventions, social media data, digital social prescribing, psychiatry, psychology, ultra-audible watermarking, financial health, space health, statistics, policy, public engagement, molecular biology, neuroimaging, epidemiology, and more. I have experience developing and managing multi-million pound research initiatives. I love engaging with youth culture, the arts and society.

I am affiliated with the University of Cambridge, Creator of the Digital Innovation in Mental Health conference, Co-founder of Hip Hop Psych, and hold several Advisory positions (e.g., Alan Turing Institute; Lancet Digital Health; Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, Global Advisor, Facebook; Wysa; AI Global Governance Commission; IBM Watson AI XPrize)

www.beckyinkster.com

@Dr_Inkster

Dr. Berman is Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  Between 1995 and 2014 he served as Executive Director of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS). Prior to this he attained the rank of tenured full professor of psychology at American University (1969-1991) and was named Director of the National Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide at the Washington School of Psychiatry (1991-1995).   He is a Past-President of the AAS (1984-1985) and of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (2009-2013).  He is the AAS’s 1982 Shneidman Award recipient (for Outstanding Contributions in Research in Suicidology), and 2006 Louis I. Dublin Award recipient (for outstanding service and contributions to the field of suicide prevention).  A Diplomate in Clinical Psychology and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the International Academy for Suicide Research, Dr. Berman maintains a private practice of psychological and forensic consultation in Chevy Chase, MD.  He has published over 160 professional articles and book chapters and has edited/authored 8 books.

Dr. Jessica Ribeiro earned her B.A. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. She then pursued her graduate degree in Clinical Psychology at Florida State University under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Joiner, earning her Ph.D. in 2014. After her predoctoral internship at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University (2013-14), she completed post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University (2014-15) and at Vanderbilt University (2015-16).  She is now an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University. The ultimate goal of her research is to produce substantial reductions in suicidal behavior. To this end, Dr. Ribeiro’s research program cuts across three major domains of suicide science: Risk – specifically, identifying who is at risk and when they will engage in suicidal behavior; Cause – what facilitates suicidal behavior and what deters it; and Intervention – how do we translate information about cause into efficacious interventions and how do we implement those interventions on a large-scale. Prioritizing prediction science over the last several years, her work has centered on understanding the state of suicide prediction research and making substantive advances toward accurate risk prediction and scalable risk detection, with recent efforts leveraging advances in data science to do so.

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

Dr. Erlangsen is the national representative for Denmark as well as co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Suicide in Older Adults for the International Association of Suicide Prevention. She is a member of the Danish National Partnership for Suicide Prevention. In addition, she is member of the Editorial Board of Lancet Psychiatry, Crisis, and Suicidology Online. In 2003, she received the Young Lecturer Award at the European Symposium for Suicide and Suicidal Behaviour and in 2014 she was awarded the Alexander Gralnick Award from the American Association of Suicidology and the Danish Nordentoft Award.

Dr. Erlangsen’s research interests include suicide in high risk populations, older adults, bereaved by suicide, affected by suicide attempt, and psychosocial interventions for people at risk of suicide as well as research applied to record linkage data. She has published numerous papers in peer reviewed journals as well as book chapters and editorials.

Ellenor Mittendorfer-Rutz is Professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, where she is also Acting Head of the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Head of the Division of Insurance Medicine. She further holds a Guest professorship at the Medical University in Vienna. Dr. Mittendorfer-Rutz is editorial board member of several international medical journals and Principle investigator of several international research consortia. Her work responds to the complexity of suicidological research 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 mental health and suicidal behavior in asylum seekers and refugees. 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. James Bolton is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba in Canada. He is the Medical Director of the Winnipeg Crisis Response Centre, the primary facility for emergency mental health care and crisis line support in the province of Manitoba, with more than 17,000 contacts annually. Dr. Bolton’s research interests include suicide, bereavement, and psychiatric epidemiology. His work is supported by national and international grants including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and a NARSAD Young Investigator Award.

Cynthia Fontanella, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Dr. Fontanella received her PhD from the University of Maryland at Baltimore, Master's degree from Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work, and Bachelor's degree from Villanova University with high honors. Prior to coming to Ohio State University, she was a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. As a mental health services researcher, her research focuses on the associations between health service use, quality of care, and suicide for vulnerable low-income children and adolescents. Currently, she is Principal Investigator on two national grants. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) grant focuses on identifying high risk transition periods and predictors of suicide for youth in public child serving systems. The study uses data from an integrated population-based data that links data across multiple child serving agencies. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) grant focuses on identifying the clinical profiles and service utilization patterns of suicide decedents enrolled in Medicaid compared to controls. The study also examines the effects of minimal standards of care on risk for suicide. Dr. Fontanella’s research has been published in highly regarded journals such as: JAMA Pediatrics, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, and Pediatrics. Her work has been featured in numerous media outlets including the New York Times, NPR, US. News and World Report, Boston Globe, Reuters and many others.

Nav is Professor of Psychiatry and Population Health at the University of Manchester, UK, and an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. He is Head of Research at the Centre for Suicide Prevention in the University of Manchester and leads the suicide work programme of the National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide which collects data on all suicide deaths among people in contact with health services in the UK. He was Chair of the Guideline Development Group for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) self-harm guidelines (longer term management) and also chaired the Quality Standards for self-harm. He is currently chairing the NICE guidelines for depression in adults and is topic expert on the NICE guidelines for suicide prevention in the community. He is a member of the Department of Health’s (England) National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group. He has published extensively on suicide and self-harm with much of his research focussing on how health services might best contribute to suicide prevention.

Courtney Bagge, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and Director of Suicide Research. Dr. Bagge’s program of research aims to increase understanding of the etiology, course, and treatment of suicidal behaviors across the lifespan. A primary focus of her research is to identify potential warning signs for suicidal behavior, which indicate when an individual is at heightened suicide risk in the near term (i.e., within minutes, hours, or days). She has developed and refined fine-grained methodological approaches for examining the 48 hours preceding a suicide attempt.  Dr. Bagge’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Alcohol and Alcoholism, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the Department of Defense. In addition, she frequently serves as an expert on national (e.g., the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention) and international (the World Health Organization) work groups to further understanding of imminent risk for suicidal behaviors. Dr. Bagge was the 2017 recipient of the American Association for Suicidology Edwin S. Shneidman Award for outstanding contributions to research in the field of suicidology.

Igor Galynker MD PhD Igor Galynker is the Director for Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and is the Founder and Director of the Zirinsky Family Center for Bipolar Disorder and of the Mount Sinai Beth Israel Suicide Research Laboratory. He is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City.

He obtained BA and MA in Chemistry from Moscow University, his PhD in Chemistry from Columbia University, and his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He completed his residency in Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai medical Center in New York City. A veteran psychiatrist with expertise in a wide range of human emotions and relationships, he maintains an active clinical practice, research program. He was recipient of many industry grants, several NIMH grants, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Focus Grant on the assessment of short-term suicide risk.

His diverse interests include behavioral addictions, bipolar disorder, suicide prevention, and the role of family in psychiatric illness. He has published on these topics both in professional journals and in the lay press. Over the last 10 years his research has been devoted to describing a suicide-specific clinical state, a phenotype of the Suicide Crisis Syndrome (SCS) and to developing innovative methods of suicide risk assessment, which do not rely on patients’ self-report of suicidal ideation or intent and making use of clinicians’ emotional responses to suicidal patients.

Igor Galynker has published over 120 peer-reviewed scientific papers and is the author of three books, Talking to Families about Mental Illness, Choosing Right, and The Suicidal Crisis.  He is frequently featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Daily News, USA Today, ABC News, Fox News, CBS News, SELF, Psychiatric Times, JAMA, and many other online news sources, as well as by MDedge and Medscape.

Anthony R. Pisani, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Rochester Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide and Founder of SafeSide Prevention. Dr. Pisani is an internationally recognized leader in suicide prevention education and workforce development. His frameworks for risk formulation and suicide safer care have been widely disseminated in health systems in the U.S. and around the world.

Philippe Courtet is Professor of psychiatry at the University of Montpellier, and Head of the Department of Emergency & acute care Psychiatry at the Academic Hospital, Montpellier, France. He leads the Chair of excellence in prevention of suicide of the Fondation Fondamental. He leads a research group “vulnerability of suicidal behaviour” in the INSERM. His areas of interest involve vulnerability to suicidal behaviour, focusing on brain imaging and social pain. He is now implementing projects using web-based tools for assessing and managing suicidal patients.

Professor Courtet is chairman of the task force “suicide” of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry, past-President of the French Association of Biological Psychiatry and Neuropsychopharmacology, member of the European Psychiatric Association and the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

He has published more than 270 articles in peer-reviewed journals and numerous book chapters and edited three books on suicidal behaviour.

Affiliations:

CHU of Montpellier, INSERM U1061, University of Montpellier,

Fondamental Foundation

Dr Olivia Kirtley, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow within the Center for Contextual Psychiatry at KU Leuven in Belgium. She co-chairs the Early Career Group of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) and is co-coordinator of the Early Career Researchers IASR/AFSP conference program. Olivia received her BSc (hons) in psychology in 2011 from the University of Stirling, Scotland, before going on to complete her PhD in psychological medicine within the Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory at the University of Glasgow in 2016. Her PhD research was on the topic of emotional and physical pain in individuals who think about and engage in self-harm. Olivia’s first postdoctoral position within the Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory was a study investigating the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and self-harm in adults, and it was during this time that she developed her interest in suicide in individuals with chronic pain. At the end of 2016, Olivia moved to Belgium to take up a postdoctoral position in the Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology at the University of Ghent, working on a project about psychosocial factors involved in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. She joined the Center for Contextual Psychiatry at KU Leuven in 2017, where she currently leads “SIGMA”, a large-scale longitudinal study of adolescent mental health and development using experience sampling methods.

Olivia’s current research uses experience sampling to investigate dynamic processes involved in ideation-to-action transitions in adolescents who self-harm. Previously, she has conducted experimental research into altered pain tolerance in adults who think about and engage in self-harm, as well as investigating the links between emotional and physical pain. Her current work focuses on mapping psychological factors involved in suicide among people with chronic pain, in particular the roles of defeat, future orientation, mental imagery and psychological flexibility. Olivia is a member of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and is involved in several projects aimed at increasing transparency and reproducibility in clinical psychology research, by implementing greater use of open science practices.

Dr. Cheatle earned his PhD in psychology at Princeton University. He completed his clinical internship at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine and founded the Orthopaedic Pain Center at PENN. Currently he is Director of Behavioral Medicine at the PENN Pain Medicine Center and Director, Pain and Chemical Dependency Research at the Center for Studies of Addiction, University of Pennsylvania. He is an Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.  Dr. Cheatle specializes in the evaluation and treatment of chronic pain disorders from a biopsychosocial perspective and has been involved in extensive research including a NIH funded 5-year longitudinal study of the development of addiction in patients initiating prescription opioid therapy for chronic pain and as PI of a NIH/NIDA grant assessing phenotypic and genotypic markers of prescription opioid abuse.  His main focus of research is pain management and addiction in vulnerable populations (HIV/AIDS, psychiatric patients) and pain and suicidal ideation and behavior.

Ulf Baumgärtner was born in Hamburg, Germany, where he studied medicine and got his M.D. degree. He then entered the lab of Prof. Bromm (Hamburg) and started his scientific career doing EEG recordings in human pain studies. His thesis focused on reduced opioid efficacy in bone marrow transplant patients. His main interest is the cortical representation of pain in humans using EEG, MEG, PET and fMRI as methods to analyze brain activity together with psychophysical methods. For meanwhile 15 years, he is investigating in close collaboration with C. Schmahl and colleagues possible mechanisms in borderline personality disorder patients, which underlie self-injurious behavior in stress regulation. He currently holds a position as associate professor at the Medical Faculty Mannheim of Heidelberg University, Germany.

Merete Nordentoft is Professor in Psychiatry, University of Copenhagen. Merete Nordentoft played a leading role in developing and implementing early intervention services in Denmark. She is an expert in epidemiology, suicidal behaviour, psychopathology and early intervention in psychosis. She has led the process from research to implementation of early intervention services all over Denmark. Professor Nordentoft has worked with suicide prevention at a national level since 1997 and together with a group of epidemiologists from Nordic countries, she has demonstrated that life expectancy for people with schizophrenia is 15 to 20 years shorter than in the general population. She is one of the six principal investigators in iPSYCH, the Lundbeck Foundation Initiative for Integrated Psychiatric Research. The main goals of iPSYCH are to identify the causes of mental disorders by studying the genetic and environmental factors and thereby find new targets for treatment.

Merete Nordentoft initiated the Danish High Risk and Resilience Study VIA 7 -a representative cohort study of 522 7 year old children with 0, 1, or 2 parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Professor Nordentoft was given the prestigious awards: The Golden Scalpel, Global Excellence in Health, the Richard Wyatt Award, the Marie and August Krogh Award, and the Honorific Award from the Danish Medical Association. In 2017, she was identified as one of the one percent most cited researchers in the period 2005-2015.

She was the president of International Early Psychosis Association (IEPA) from 2012 to 2014, and since 2017 she was a board member of Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS).

Jordan DeVylder is an Associate Professor at the Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. He received his MSW and PhD in Social Work from Columbia University, his MS in Cognition & Brain Science from Georgia Institute of Technology, and his BA in Psychology from New York University. Dr. DeVylder’s research is focused on preventive mental health, with a particular emphasis on psychosis and suicide. His research on the clinical significance of early psychotic symptoms has been published in leading social work and psychiatry journals, including JAMA Psychiatry, World Psychiatry, and Schizophrenia Bulletin. He currently has funding from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to examine sub-clinical psychosis as an indicator of suicide risk among adolescents receiving emergency health services in Baltimore. He is also conducting a randomized trial to test an intervention to improve the detection of untreated psychosis by social workers employed in community settings, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. He has several ongoing projects focused on the epidemiology of psychosis and suicide, examining the mental health effects of stress, urban upbringing, and crime victimization in the United States and internationally. He has more recently focused on studying the impact of police violence from a public mental health perspective, finding that exposure to police violence is associated with notably elevated levels of delusional thoughts and suicidal behavior.

Ian Kelleher, MD, PhD, is a Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist at the Health Service Executive, Ireland; Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, School of Medicine; Director ARK (At Risk Kids) lab. His research focuses on identifying young people at risk for suicidal behavior and psychosis, as well as the interrelationship between the two. He has received awards for his research from the European Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

 

Cheryl King, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Michigan, and Director of the Youth Depression and Suicide Prevention Research Program. Her research focuses on the development of evidence-based practices for suicide risk screening, assessment, and intervention. She is currently Principal Investigator of three NIMH-funded research projects: Emergency Department Screen for Teens at Risk for Suicide (ED-STARS), which aims to develop an adaptive suicide risk screen that can be disseminated nationwide; Electronic Bridge to Mental Health for College Students (eBridge), which aims to test the efficacy of an online suicide risk screening and treatment linkage counseling program; and 24-Hour Risk for Suicide Attempts in a National Cohort of Adolescents. A clinical educator and research mentor, Dr. King has served as Director of Psychology Training and Chief Psychologist in the Department of Psychiatry, and has twice received the Teacher of the Year Award in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She is the lead author of Teen Suicide Risk: A Practitioner Guide to Screening, Assessment, and Management. In addition, Dr. King has provided testimony in the U.S. Senate on youth suicide prevention and is a Past President of the American Association of Suicidology, the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers, and the Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

Katrina Witt is American Foundation for Suicide Prevention post-doctoral fellow based at Orygen, the National Centre for Excellence in Youth Mental Health at The University of Melbourne, Australia. She earnt her Doctorate degree from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and she continues to have an ongoing honorary appointment with the Centre for Suicide Research at the University of Oxford. Her interests and expertise represent multiple areas, including improving statistical methods for the evaluation of effective suicide prevention and self-harm intervention programs across settings. She is also interested in the development of real-time surveillance for suicide and self-harm.  To this end, she was recently commissioned by the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services to co-lead on the development of authoritative clinical practice guidelines for the treatment of all suicidal persons presenting to Victorian emergency departments. She has also been a methods editor for the Cochrane Collaboration’s Common Mental Disorders group since 2015. She has received numerous commendations and awards for her work, including most recently from the Victorian Young Achiever’s Foundation and the BUPA Foundation.

Maria A. Oquendo, M.D., Ph.D. is Professor and Chairman of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Oquendo graduated Summa cum Laude from Tufts University. She attended the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and completed her residency training at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital Cornell.

Her expertise is in the diagnosis, pharmacologic treatment, and neurobiology of Bipolar Disorder and Major Depression with a special emphasis on suicidal behavior and in Global Mental Health. Internationally known for neurobiological studies of suicidal behavior, Dr. Oquendo has used PET and MRI to map brain abnormalities in mood disorders and suicidal behavior, to disambiguate common and divergent biological contributors to each. In 2003, when issues regarding antidepressants' potential risk for inducing suicidal behavior first arose, Dr. Oquendo and colleagues were commissioned by the FDA to develop a classification system to examine suicide-related events in the data. This system is endorsed by the FDA and CDC and now used worldwide. Oquendo first proposed suicidal behavior should be its own diagnostic category in 2008. Arguing it would facilitate tracking of high risk patients in medical records, she succeeded in adding it to DSM-5’s appendix in 2013. Critically, this conceptualization addresses the fact that suicidal behavior occurs in conditions from schizophrenia to autism, not only as a depressive symptom. Her research to support its validity and reliability as a diagnostic entity is ongoing. She has authored or co-authored over 350 peer-reviewed articles.

Dr. Oquendo is President of the APA, President of the International Academy of Suicide Research and past President of the American Society of Hispanic Psychiatrists. She is also Vice President of the Board of Directors of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and a member of the National Institute of Mental Health’s Advisory Council. She is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the American College of Psychiatrists.

Her awards include Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (1993); Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill for Commitment to Multicultural and Underserved Communities (2002); Gerald Klerman Award from the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (2005), National Hispanic Medical Association Hispanic Health Leadership Award (2009), Sociedad Espanola de Psiquiatria’s Miembro de Honor (2009), Simon Bolivar Award, APA (2010), Rafael Tavares Award, Association of Hispanic Mental Health Providers (2010), Honorary Professor at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Lima, Peru (2011), Stengel Award from the International Academy of Suicide Research (2013), Honorary Member of the Sociedad Colombiana de Psiquiatria Biologica (2014), Honorary Member of the Sociedad Española de Psiquiatria Biologica (2016) and the Virginia Kneeland Award for Distinguished Women in Medicine from Columbia University (2016).

Dr. Ruocco is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto. Dr. Ruocco's research uses neurocognitive and brain imaging measures to understand the pathophysiology underlying suicide risk and severe mental disorders, especially borderline personality disorder. His current studies focus on identifying neurocognitive and neural markers in adolescents and adults with borderline personality disorder and their biological relatives, and he is studying the utility of these markers to understand the effects of psychological and brain stimulation interventions on self-harm and suicidal ideation. Dr. Ruocco is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2017 Young Investigator Research Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Yeates Conwell, M.D. is Professor of and Vice Chair of Psychiatry, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, where he is Director of the UR Medical Center’s Office for Aging Research and Health Services and Co-Director of the UR Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide. Immediate Past President and Chair of the Scientific Council of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Dr. Conwell received his medical training at the University of Cincinnati, and completed his Psychiatry Residency and a Fellowship in Geriatric Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine. In addition to teaching, clinical care, and service system development, Dr. Conwell directs an inter-disciplinary program of research in aging, mental health services, and suicide prevention.

Dr. Gregory K. Brown is a Research Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania and a VISN 4 MIRECC Investigator and Clinical Psychologist at the Corporal Michael J Crescenz VA Medical Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the Director of the Center for the Prevention of Suicide at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Brown is one of the nation’s leading scholars in suicide prevention. His research aims to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of innovative, targeted interventions designed to reduce vulnerability factors associated with suicide behavior and depression in high risk populations and to examine the implementation of evidence-based treatments into “real world” settings to prevent suicide. Dr. Brown is the co-developer of the Safety Plan Intervention, along with Dr. Barbara Stanley, that is widely used in research and clinical settings. He is the co-developer of the Cognitive Therapy for Suicide Prevention intervention, a brief evidence-based, psychotherapy intervention which has been shown to prevent suicide attempts. He has been the Principle Investigator or Co-Investigator of numerous effectiveness and implementation trials that evaluate their use in a variety of health care settings.

Barbara Stanley, PhD, is Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. She is also Director of the Suicide Intervention Center and is a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Stanley is the principal investigator on several NIMH and foundation grants investigating clinical and neurobiological factors and intervention strategies related to suicidal behavior, self injury, and borderline personality disorder. Among her grant awards is an NIMH “Excellence in Curriculum” award (with Beth Brodsky) to develop a Dialectical Behavior Therapy curriculum for psychiatry residents. She is the author of more than 150 publications and serves as editor-in-chief of the Archives of Suicide Research and is a standing member of the Adult Psychopathology and Disorders of Aging NIH CSR study section. With her colleague, Dr. Gregory Brown, she developed the Safety Planning Intervention that is used throughout the VA and on crisis hotlines across the United States. She is also conducting a project in VA to develop and evaluate an intervention for treating and following suicidal veteran in urgent care settings and post-discharge. She has received numerous awards including the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Research Award and the Suicide Prevention Center of New York Research Award.

I am Professor and director of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Leipzig. I was Head of the former German Research Network on Depression and Suicidality. I am referred to as international expert in depression research and suicide prevention and have coordinated several large EU-funded projects on these topics. So far, I have published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers. I received among others the “European Health Award” (1st prize) for the project “European Alliance Against Depression (EAAD)” and I am currently president of the EAAD and the German Depression Foundation. My research focus is on the neurobiology of depression and affective disorders, the treatment and the prevention of affective disorders, prevention of suicidal behaviour.

Dr. Dwivedi received his Ph.D. from Central Drug Research Institute, India, a premier research institution with a focus on developing novel drugs. He did his post-doctoral training at the Illinois State Psychiatric Research Institute, Chicago. He then joined University of Illinois at Chicago as Assistant Professor and reached to the rank of tenured Professor. He joined the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Alabama at Birmingham in August 2013 as the Elesabeth Ridgely Shook Endowed Chair in Psychiatry and tenured Professor and Director of Translational Research, UAB Mood Disorders Program. Dr. Dwivedi is an internationally recognized molecular neuroscientist who has significantly contributed to the understanding of fundamental molecular mechanisms associated with stress biology and mood disorders and suicide. He has received numerous awards, and is a member of US National Institute of Mental Health study section; Chair of PMDA NIMH study section, and member of Scientific Council of American Foundation of Suicide Prevention and Genetics and Neurobiology Task Force associated with International Association of Suicide Prevention. He has been consistently funded by National Institute of Mental Health and American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. He has published 145 papers, numerous book chapters and has edited a book: The Neurobiological Basis of Suicide. He serves on the editorial Board of several scientific journals and has been invited worldwide for various talks and symposia.

Dr. Dwivedi’s research primarily focuses on understanding the neurobiological mechanisms associated with major depression and suicidal behavior. Major depression is among the most prevalent and recurrent forms of psychiatric illnesses affecting about 17% of the population at some point in life and associated with a high risk of suicide. Lifetime suicide attempt rate among adults is about 10% and suicide among teenagers is the 3rd leading cause of death. In order to increase the understanding of these disorders and identify new therapeutic targets and treatment approaches, Dr. Dwivedi’s lab is examining the molecular and cellular nature of events in the brain that may lead to suicidal and depressive behavior. To achieve this, he is utilizing various approaches using human postmortem brain studies, peripheral blood cell studies from patient population, rat brain studies involving manipulation of the stress axis, rodent models of depression and post-traumatic disorder, and gene knock-out mice. His primary area of research includes neurotransmitter receptors, cytokines, neurotrophins, cellular signaling, neural plasticity, and gene regulation in depression and suicide risk using gene expression, RNA sequencing, microRNAs, and epigenetic approaches.

Dr. Haghighi is a Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of the Laboratory of Medical Epigenetics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She obtained her PhD in Statistical Genetics in 2000 and went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in 2004, both from Columbia University. Her research is focused on understanding how epigenetic mechanisms contribute to the risk of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders. Her studies have characterized regional and cell specific epigenetic neuronal profiles during human brain development important in understanding neuropathological alterations in depression and suicidal behavior. Dr. Haghighi is a recipient of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's Distinguished Investigator Award.  She is also a Principle Investigator on awards from the National Institute of Health and the US Department of Veteran Affairs.  Her work is highly cited, and featured in national and international scientific publications.

Dr Coryell is the George Winokur Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.  His more than 400 journal articles and book chapters have described many facets of the phenomenology, course and outcome of mood disorders. Investigations into clinical and biological risk factors for suicidal behaviors have comprised a particular focus and his work produced some of the earliest findings concerning the now well-established role of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis hyperactivity as a risk factor for completed suicide.  Subsequent work has tested low cholesterol concentrations, psychosis, anxiety, alcohol intake, inflammatory markers and particular microbial infections as additional risk factors for suicidal behaviors.

Dr. Postolache is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and a VA Research Investigator with the VA Rocky Mountain MIRECC for Suicide prevention in Denver Colorado and VISN 5 MIRECC in Baltimore, Maryland. A graduate of the Cluj-Napoca Medical School in Romania, Dr. Postolache completed, his residency training in Psychiatry at the Beth Israel Medical Center (New York, NY) and a research fellowship at the Section on Biological Rhythms at NIMH.

Dr Teodor T. Postolache studies influences of physical, chemical and biological factors on mental health through immune, circadian and metabolic pathways, in interaction with genetic and developmental vulnerabilities. His research engages macro-epidemiological, clinical, animal and postmortem collaborative approaches. His research has been funded by NIH, NARSAD, US-FDA, AFSP and the VA (currently PI on an ongoing multicenter VA Merit Award on Toxoplasma gondii, inflammation, kynurenines and suicidal behavior). Dr. Postolache is a board-certified psychiatrist and a licensed physician in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and is certified in Behavioral Sleep Medicine.  Dr. Postolache is a Senior Investigator on the Military and Veteran Microbiome consortium for research and education (Denver CO), and a recipient of a Distinguished Investigator Award of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. 

 

J. John Mann is The Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience (in Psychiatry and in Radiology) at Columbia University and Director, Molecular Imaging and Neuropathology Division at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is a Past President of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, the International Academy of Suicide Research and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Dr. Mann received his medical degree from the University of Melbourne, and then completed his internship and residency at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He was trained in Psychiatry and Internal Medicine and has a Doctorate in Neurochemistry. His research employs functional brain imaging, neurochemistry and molecular genetics to probe the causes of depression and suicide. Dr. Mann has published over 600 peer-reviewed papers and edited 11 books on the subjects of the biology and treatment of mood disorders, suicidal behavior and other psychiatric disorders and has been continuously funded by the NIH since 1984. In private practice he specializes in the treatment of mood disorders and has been repeatedly named as America's and New York Best Doctors by Castle Connolly.

Dr. Mann has received numerous research and teaching awards, including the American Suicide Foundation Research Award, the American Association of Suicidology Louis I. Dublin Award, the New York State Office of Mental Health Research Award, the Klerman Senior Investigator Award from the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association, the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry Medical Student Teaching Award, the Stengel Award from the International Association for Suicide Prevention, the Morselli Medal from the International Academy of Suicide Research and the Mood Disorders Research Award from the American College of Psychiatrists.

Dr. Mann is an Honorary Professor of the University "Ss. Cyril and Methodius", Skopje, Macedonia and received a Visiting Professor Award from the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists.

Dr. Shear is the Marion E. Kenworthy Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Center for Complicated Grief at Columbia School of Social Work. Dr. Shear has spent decades conducting clinical research in anxiety, depression and related disorders. She developed complicated grief treatment and confirmed its efficacy in three large NIMH-funded studies. This treatment is strength-based and incorporates methods from other proven efficacious psychotherapies to provide a short-term, focused approach to fostering adaptation to loss. She is widely recognized for her work in bereavement, including both research and clinical awards from the Association for Death Education and Counseling and invited authorship of articles for Uptodate and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Professor Malone is currently Head of Subject (Psychiatry) at the UCD School of Medicine, UCD, Ireland, and has been Professor / Consultant Psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s University Hospital, Elm Park since 2002. He leads an inter-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary Suicide Studies Research Programme at UCD, incorporating basic and clinical science and collaborative Arts / humanities studies. He recently published an in-depth research report on Suicide in Ireland 2003-2008.

He graduated from Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in 1984, and conducted his postgraduate training in Psychiatry in Dublin (1985-1989). He was UCD tutor in Psychiatry at UCD from 1990-1991. He then took up a two-year Fogarty International Fellowship award with Prof John Mann, at University of Pittsburgh, USA, where he remained as Assistant Professor until 1994. He continued to work with Prof Mann at Columbia University, where he was Director of Clinical Assessment and Treatment Studies in Suicidal Depression and Associate Professor at Columbia University New York, USA (1994-1998). He returned to Ireland to take up the position of Consultant Psychiatrist and Senior Lecturer at Mater Hospital UCD, and was appointed Professor of Psychiatry at SVUH /UCD in 2002.

He is the recipient of several academic research awards including a 2-year NIH Fogarty International Fellowship Award, The Research Medal of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK), and a Distinguished Investigator Award from The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. He has authored and co-authored over 150 original research articles, with over 10,000 citings in peer-reviewed journals. In response to the rise in youth suicide in Modern Ireland, he founded the Irish Chapter of The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in 1998, which subsequently became the Turn the Tide of Suicide (3Ts) charity in 2003. He is the recipient of two Wellcome Trust-funded Science and Society People Awards as Principal Investigator for his 12 year collaborative Science-Arts project (Lived Lives - Dr. Seamus McGuinness, Co-Investigator), engaging with suicide-bereaved families, and creating community post-vention intervention initiatives with other suicide-bereaved families, with young people, including those who are socially marginalized, with 1^st responders, with service-users and policy-makers (2015/2017). This Post-vention work has become embedded in the Donegal Action Plan for Suicide Prevention as part of Ireland’s National Suicide Prevention Plan (Connecting for Life – 2015-2020).