Word from Our Director

Welcome to the sixth edition of our newsletter from the NIMH-funded Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide (CAPES) at UMass Chan Medical School! We sincerely hope that everyone was able to enjoy a relaxing holiday season. There have been two important developments in the past few months. First, we received a planning grant from the Four Pines Fund, a foundation that promotes evidence-based suicide care. This grant will help us prepare a proposal to submit in the Fall that, if funded, will help consolidate and update all of the products, training, and materials from past grants to help accelerate their dissemination and adoption. This will turn knowledge and 'know-how' currently locked in siloed spaces, making them difficult to share and use by anyone outside of CAPES, into high-quality, professionally produced resources designed to be easily shared and adopted in real-world settings.

Second, CAPES is experiencing a leadership change. Dr. Caterina Kiefe is stepping down as Co-Director, leaving Dr. Boudreaux as sole Director while the Center recruits a methodologist to replace her. Dr. Kiefe has served CAPES with distinction, building methodological expertise spanning a truly impressive range of disciplines. While stepping down as Director, she will remain active in CAPES! She will continue overseeing the Methods Core while transitioning oversight to Drs. Tony Nunes and Emmanuel Agu. The Center owes a great debt to Dr. Kiefe, and her legacy will live on through the transdisciplinary team she built. Dr. Kiefe's reduction in responsibility will enable her to spend more time mentoring the next generation, be with her family, and travel the world. Finally, Dr. Nunes is being promoted to Methods Core Co-Lead, and Dr. JungAe Lee is being promoted to Co-Lead of the Design, Data, and Analysis Unit with Dr. Bruce Barton. These leadership transitions will expand our capacity and better serve CAPES faculty.

Sincerely,

Ed Boudreaux, PhD

Director, Center for Accelerating Practices to End Suicide

Dr. Nephew works with Dean Jean King at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Their program of research is focused on identifying and studying neurobehavioral mechanisms of mental illness and developing effective interventions. Recent projects include using functional MRI (fMRI) to identify the neural correlates of mindfulness-based stress reduction as part of a stage IIa randomized clinical trial, and using fMRI data combined with related clinical measures to develop machine learning-based early predictors of severe depression and suicidality. He developed a transgenerational social stress-based rodent model of postpartum depression/anxiety, and related clinical work explores the role of behavioral hormones, discrimination, and epigenetic changes in postpartum depression/anxiety. His current focus is on applying machine learning with an array of biopsychosocial data from a clinical trial to predict the response to a mindfulness intervention for chronic low back pain. He is also involved in a project using machine learning to predict anxiety, depression, and suicidality in middle and high school students, and an associated initiative is exploring the impact of social media on youth mental health.

Nicholas is a Research Assistant and PhD Candidate at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and UMass Chan Medical School Collaborator working with Dr. Elke Rundensteiner of CAPES. He also collaborates with Dr. Feifan Liu on the CAPES ADAPT project for identifying individuals at risk of suicide using machine learning techniques. Nicholas has a BA in Physics from Wheaton College in Norton, MA and a MS in Data Science from WPI. He has a passion for applying machine and deep learning techniques to solve real-world problems, specifically in the healthcare domain.

Dr. Lopez is a social neuroscientist and assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). He investigates the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation to improve health and wellbeing in daily life. His Social Neuroscience of Affective Processes (SNAP) Lab at WPI develops personalized, psychologically informed interventions aimed at improving young people's mental health. Recently, the SNAP Lab has identified psychological factors linked to social media use that could be targeted in interventions to reduce anxiety and depression. As a CAPES scholar, Dr. Lopez is eager to expand his research program, collaborating with clinicians to enhance understanding of suicide prediction and prevention, with a particular focus on early, technology-based intervention strategies.

Dr. Sabella is an Assistant Professor at UMass Chan Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry and Deputy Director of the Implementation Science and Practice Advances Research Center (iSPARC) and Director of the Transitions to Adulthood Center for Research. She is one of only a few national scholars in young adult mental health and has emerged as one of the leading experts in the field. Her research employs qualitative and quantitative methods and community based participatory methods to a) create new knowledge about the needs and experiences of young adults with serious mental health conditions, and b) apply that knowledge to the development, testing, and implementation of age-appropriate and culturally appealing evidence-based practices that can improve the lives of these young adults. She is Co-PI of the Community Inclusion and Reflective Collaboration Center that seeks to improve community participation outcomes among young adults with mental health conditions from backgrounds that have been marginalized (NIDILRR/ACL/HHS# 90RTCP0010).

Dr. Yang is as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Family Resilience and Child Development (FRCD) lab at the Implementation Science and Practice Advances Research Center (iSPARC), working under Dr. Shaobing Su. Her research focuses on intersectional effects of neurodiversity and cultural diversity. With practical experiences working at the special education field and with the immigrant population, she prioritizes culturally responsive research methodologies and are sensitive to the cultural contexts of participants. She intends to explore the adaptations of materials and technologies to make them more accessible and appropriate for marginalized populations with different cultural backgrounds.