Jamie Zelazny PhD, MPH, RN

Dr. Zelazny is an Assistant Professor of Nursing and Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, where her research is focused on the use of innovative technology to identify and manage suicidal risk in youth. She has over 35 years of clinical and research experience with suicidal youth. Her research career in the study of suicidal behavior began over 25 years ago when I joined Dr. David Brent’s research team as project coordinator and gained extensive experience in all aspects of study implementation, recruitment, and suicide assessment. Dr. Zelazny's dissertation research explored the interaction between childhood maltreatment and genes of the HPA-axis on suicidal behavior.  During her postdoctoral fellowship, she began to focus intensively on the identification of proximal risk factors for suicidality and collaborated with Dr. Tina Goldstein on the Sleep Predicting Outcomes in Teens (SPOT) study. She is now a co-investigator on her NIMH funded study building on that work.  I served as a Pittsburgh site co-investigator on a U01(MH116923;Nick Allen, Randy Auerbach) using smartphone technology to conduct intensive longitudinal monitoring of proximal risk factors using state-of-the-art computational methods to develop predictive algorithms for adolescent suicidal thoughts and behavior. Dr. Zelazny collaborates with investigators from the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University on a pilot study preparing to implement predictive algorithms to detect suicidal risk from electronic health records.  In her pilot study “Social Media Assessment of Risk in Teens”, they collected both objective and subjective retrospective social media data from a sample of teens in outpatient care who recently attempted suicide and from controls, showing feasibility and acceptability of these methods.  Building on this work, she received funding from NIMH as principal investigator for a R21 to continue this work in a larger sample.  In another collaboration with Dr. Goldstein on the ETUDES Center, she is PI on an R34 using mobile sensing to inform a behavioral activation intervention. Through her role as Vice Chair at the University of Pittsburgh Institutional Review Board, she has a unique perspective regarding the ethical issues involved in research involving suicidal youth and with the use of new and innovative technology in vulnerable populations. Dr. Zelazny is committed to the training, mentorship, and promotion of trainees of varying backgrounds. As a graduate of a University of Pittsburgh T32 program herself, Dr. Zelazny is very familiar with and well-equipped to provide training and mentorship to the scholars who receive training as part of this program.