Scientific Advisory Board
Edwin Boudreaux, PhD
Dr. Boudreaux is a clinical psychologist and Professor in the departments of Emergency Medicine, Psychiatry, and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. Plus, he is Executive Vice Chair for Research with the department of Emergency Medicine at the UMass Chan Medical School. He is Co-Director of the P50 Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide through Technology Translation (CAPES). Dr. Boudreaux is passionate about accelerating the transformation of suicide-related care in healthcare settings that are compassionate and person-centers as well as informed by the latest technologies. He brings experience in two domains that will inform CAPES’ mission and operations. First, he has successfully completed more than 20 extramurally funded studies focused on suicide screening, risk stratification, clinical decision making, and brief interventions. These studies have transcended setting to include emergency departments (ED), inpatient medical and psychiatric units, primary care, outpatient mental health practices, and other outpatient settings (e.g., OB/GYN, oncology). He has built and led transdisciplinary teams and advanced implementation of healthcare systems-based strategies, like the Zero Suicide framework. Second, he has developed, studied, deployed, and commercialized a range of technologies to enable assessment and management of numerous behavioral health targets, including suicide risk. Much of this experience has been gained as Principal Investigator on seven NIH-funded Small Business Innovation Research/Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) grants. The resulting products are not only strongly rooted in theory and evidence, but they are also experiencing exponential commercial successes, which is driving the dissemination of these technologies throughout the country and improving care for hundreds of thousands of individuals.
Dr. Boudreaux's passion, experience, and network will enable him to work collaboratively with Dr. Kiefe (Center Co-Director), our Investigators and Faculty, our Advisors and Consultants, and our Stakeholders to build a truly transdisciplinary, practice-based center. The Center will lead to accelerated adoption of evidence-based suicide care across a variety of healthcare settings, ages, and sociodemographic subgroups. Accomplishing this goal will save lives, avert morbidity, and save costs by preventing suicide and suicide attempts.
David A. Brent, MD
Dr. Brent is Academic Chief, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital and holds an endowed chair in suicide studies at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He directs Services for Teens at Risk, a state-funded program for suicide prevention, education of professionals, and treatment of at-risk youth and their families.
Dr. Brent is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has been recognized for his research by many organizations, including the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Brain and Behavior Foundation.
His work has focused on the identification of risk factors for adolescent depression and suicidal behavior, and on the translation of those findings into clinical interventions. He has helped to establish standards of care for the assessment and treatment of depressed and suicidal youth. His current work is focused on understanding the familial transmission of suicidal behavior, the use of brain imaging to gain insight into how suicidal individuals think about death and suicide, the use of adaptive screens and of machine learning of electronic health records to identify suicidal risk, use of passive cell phone data to identify inflections in suicidal ideation and behavior, the prevention of suicidal behavior in youth who have been recently discharged from psychiatric hospitals, and on the use of technology to improve the ability of pediatric primary care practitioners to detect, triage, and manage depressed and suicidal youth.
John Campo
Dr. Campo is the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor and Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and VP of Psychiatric Services at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. He is board-certified in pediatrics, psychiatry, and child and adolescent psychiatry, and completed medical training at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by residencies in pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. His interests include suicide prevention, mental health services research, collaborative care for mental disorder in general medical settings, and management of functional somatic symptoms.
Christianne Esposito-Smythers, PhD
Christianne Esposito-Smythers, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Behavioral Health at George Mason University. She is also a licensed Clinical Psychologist. Dr. Esposito-Smythers’ research interests include the dissemination and implementation of culturally responsive evidence-based behavioral health interventions in community-based settings. She is also interested in the development and testing of cognitive-behavioral, family-focused, interventions for adolescent suicidal behavior, depression, substance abuse, and other high-risk behaviors. Additionally, she studies mechanisms that underlie improvement in the context of these interventions. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Office of Women’s Health, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS. She has also served on the Scientific Advisory Council for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and multiple scientific review groups for the National Institute of Mental Health.
Dr. Esposito-Smythers also uses her clinical research expertise to improve the lives of youth and families in her local community. Her Center for Evidence-Based Behavioral Health has the dual mission of: 1) supporting research to develop, test, and implement culturally responsive evidence-based behavioral health interventions in community settings; and 2) directly train clinicians and clinical supervisors in community settings (e.g., mental health centers, schools, juvenile justice settings, home-based organizations, private practice, etc.) in culturally responsive evidence-based interventions and measurement-based care. Additionally, she has served on her local Fairfax County Youth Suicide Review Team and multiple Fairfax County workgroups dedicated toward improving access to evidence-based assessment and treatment for youth and families. Her work has been recognized via the “2019 George Mason University Earl C. Williams Presidential Medal for Social Impact” and a “County of Fairfax Team Excellence Award.”
John C. Fortney, PhD
John C. Fortney, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and the Director of the Division of Population Health. He is also a Senior Research Career Scientist at the HSR&D Center for Innovation for Veteran-Centered and Value-Driven Care at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and Multiple Principal Investigator of the Virtual Care QUERI Program. For the last 34 years Dr. Fortney's research has focused on issues of access to care, especially the delivery of mental health services in rural primary care clinics. His research has been supported by NIMH, NIAAA, PCORI and VA HSR&D.
Jennifer E. Johnson
Dr. Jennifer E. Johnson is the first C. S. Mott Endowed Professor of Public Health at Michigan State University. She is a licensed clinical psychologist who conducts policy-relevant implementation and effectiveness trials of mental health and substance use interventions for vulnerable populations, including pregnant and postpartum people and individuals involved in the criminal justice system. She has been a Principal Investigator of 17 research studies funded by the National Institutes of Health, including the National Center for Health and Justice Transformation for Suicide Prevention (NCHATS; P50 MH127512).
Dr. Johnson’s studies include the first randomized trial of suicide prevention for justice-involved individuals, the first large randomized trial of any treatment for major depressive disorder in an incarcerated population, tests of implementation approaches to reduce maternal mortality disparities, and an implementation trial testing strategies for sustaining an evidence-based postpartum depression prevention program in 98 prenatal clinics serving low-income women nationally. She serves on the Science of Implementation in Health and Healthcare (SIHH) NIH Study Section.
Michael A. Lindsey
Dr. Michael A. Lindsey is a noted scholar in the fields of child and adolescent mental health, as well as a leader in the search for knowledge and solutions to generational poverty and inequality. He is the Dean and Paulette Goddard Professor of Social Work at NYU Silver School of Social Work, and an Aspen Health Innovators Fellow.
Additionally, Dr. Lindsey led 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 Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. He was also appointed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the Community Preventive Services Task Force (CPSTF).
Prior to being named NYU Silver’s Dean, Dr. Lindsey was the Constance and Martin Silver Professor of Poverty Studies and Executive Director of the NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research.
Dr. Lindsey serves on the editorial boards of the following journals: Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, Psychiatric Services, and School Mental Health.
He 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. Dr. Lindsey also completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Mark Olfson, MD, MPH
Mark Olfson, MD, MPH, Elizabeth K Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law and Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University and Research Psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute, seeks to identify gaps between clinical science and practice in behavioral health care including a focus on suicide prevention and improving the treatment of adults with serious mental illnesses and substance use disorders. He has brought attention to problems in quality of assessment and treatment of children and adults with behavioral health disorders including an emphasis on quality of care and on neglected and underserved populations. He has characterized unmet need for mental health services, the flow of patients into mental health care, and evolving national practice patterns in the assessment and management of psychiatric disorders. Dr. Olfson has received numerous federal and private foundation grants and has published over 600 academic papers.
Byron Powell
Byron Powell is an Associate Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. He is Co-Director of the Brown School’s Center for Mental Health Services Research and Associate Director of the Institute for Public Health’s Center for Dissemination & Implementation, for which he leads the Methods & Metascience Initiative. He aims to improve the quality of health and social services by designing, tailoring, and assessing the effectiveness of implementation strategies and advancing implementation research methods. His research has been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Fahs-Beck Fund for Research, and Experimentation, and the William T. Grant Foundation. In 2022, he received a Fulbright Specialist Award to Ireland at the University College Cork. Byron is Past-President of the Society for Implementation Research Collaboration. He is the Associate Director designee for the Implementation Research Institute and core faculty for the HIV, Infectious Disease and Global Health Implementation Research Institute; Training Institute for Dissemination and Implementation in Health-Australia; and the Irish Implementation Science Training Institute. Byron also serves on the editorial boards for Implementation Science and Implementation Research and Practice.
W. LaVome Robinson, PhD, ABPP
Dr. LaVome Robinson is a Professor of Psychology and affiliated with the Community Psychology program at DePaul University. A licensed psychologist and past Director of Clinical Training at DePaul, she also is a member of the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). Spanning more than four decades, Dr. Robinson has an extensive record for the successful development, implementation, and evaluation of culturally sensitive, cognitive-behavioral and school-based prevention interventions for urban African American youth who live in low-resourced neighborhoods.
Over her career, Dr. Robinson has served as PI and Co-I for multiple federal and foundation grants and she has garnered more than $20,000,000 in grant funding. Most recently, Dr. Robinson was awarded $6.6M from the National Institute of Mental Health to continue her prevention and health promotion research with African American youth.
Dr. Robinson is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Community Research and Action, the Society of Clinical Psychology, and the Society for the Study of Ethnic Minority Issues. Additionally, she has served on review committees for the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Spencer Foundation.
Dr. Robinson received her AB and MS in Psychology, and her PhD in Psychology and Public Administration, from the University of Georgia.
Holly Wilcox
Dr. Holly Wilcox is a Professor in the Department of Mental Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health with joint appointments in the Department of Health Policy and Management as well as the Johns Hopkins Schools of Medicine and Education. She helped establish a multidisciplinary research group on suicide prevention at Johns Hopkins that has been awarded the Team Science award from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. Holly uses research to advance public health approaches to suicide prevention, including policies, early intervention, and chain of care approaches. Holly serves as President of the International Academy of Suicide Research (IASR) and on the Scientific Council of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Holly is an Affiliate Investigator with the Centre for Research Excellence in Suicide Prevention of the Black Dog Institute in Australia.