Plenary speakers – SSRC
Please meet our plenary speakers who will share their knowledge and insights on suicide and suicide prevention during the conference.
More names will be released progressively.
Annette Erlangsen
Annette Erlangsen PhD is Head of program and Senior Researcher at the Danish Research Institute for Suicide Prevention in Denmark. She is also 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 serves as a co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Suicide in Older Adults in International Association for Suicide Prevention. She is a member of the Danish National Counsel for Suicide Prevention and Head of the International Scientific Committee for the German National Suicide Prevention Program. Much of her research has focused on suicide risks in relation to stressful life-events and socially marginalized groups. She has conducted RCTs and other interventions. Among others, her work has been published in Science, JAMA, BMJ, and The Lancet.
Jennifer L. Hughes
Jennifer L. Hughes, PhD, MPH, is a Psychologist and Clinical Scholar in Behavioral Health at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, College of Medicine, and the Division of Health Behavior and Health Promotion, College of Public Health, at The Ohio State University. Dr. Hughes is part of the Methods Core and multi-PI on two projects in the NIMH P50 Center for Accelerating Suicide Prevention in Real-world Settings (ASPIRES: PIs Jeff Bridge and Cynthia Fontanella), which aims to accelerate the development and use of effective interventions to reduce suicide in children and adolescents. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the UT Southwestern Center for Depression Research and Clinical Care, supporting dissemination and implementation of the Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM) program through the CDRC Training Academy, and the Texas Youth Depression and Suicide Research Network, an initiative of the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium. Dr. Hughes received her Ph.D. from UT Southwestern Medical Center and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. Dr. Hughes is a co-developer of two evidence-based treatments, one for relapse prevention of depression in children and adolescents (Relapse Prevention CBT; Kennard, Hughes, & Foxwell, 2016) and one utilizing family-based CBT for suicidal youth and their parents (SAFETY; Asarnow et al., 2015, 2017, 2021; Hughes & Asarnow, 2022). Dr. Hughes’s work has also focused on universal suicide prevention in youth through a school-based mental health promotion and suicide prevention program called Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM). She is an international trainer for YAM, working with the intervention developers to disseminate this program in the United States (Texas and Montana), Australia, and India. Dr. Hughes is a past Chair (2017-2018) of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) Child and Adolescent Depression Special Interest Group (SIG) and has served as the Newsletter Editor (2017-2021), APA Convention Program Chair (2013-2015), and Member-at-Large for Science and Practice (2023-2026) for the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 53, Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. Broadly, Dr. Hughes’s research explores the efficacy and effectiveness of psychosocial treatments for building resilience, the prevention and treatment of youth depression, and addressing suicide in youth.
Erkki Isometsä
Erkki Isometsä, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has worked on numerous studies of suicide and suicidal behavior and unipolar and bipolar mood disorders. His research has focused on their clinical epidemiology, risk factors, illness mechanisms, outcome, treatment, and associated disability. Current research includes also randomized intervention studies, ecological momentary assessment studies of mood disorders and borderline personality disorder, and studies of digital phenotyping. He was the principal investigator of a large, randomized study on the brief ASSIP intervention vs. crisis counseling for preventing repetition of suicide attempts. Besides roles in research, he has chaired and participated in numerous expert and guideline tasks. He has authored or co-authored about 350 peer reviewed scientific publications.
Nav Kapur
Nav Kapur 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 also Director of the UK’s National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health Services. He has spent the last 28 years researching suicidal behaviour, particularly its causes, treatment and prevention. He has led committees for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) including those developing guidelines for how all clinical staff should help people after self-harm. He sits on the main advisory group on suicide for the Department of Health in England and leads national quality improvement work to prevent suicide. He is the lead author of Suicide Prevention (3rd Edition, Oxford University Press) and has published over 400 academic papers. Nav is the recipient of both the American Association of Suicidology Louis I. Dublin Award for lifetime achievement in suicide prevention and the International Association of Suicide Prevention Stengel Award for outstanding research.
Ping Qin
Ping Qin, MD, PhD, is professor at National Center for Suicide Research and Prevention, University of Oslo in Norway, and head of research group for register-based study on suicide and self-harm. She is co-chair of both 2021 and 2023 IASR/AFSP International Summits, past Vice-President of IASP, and founding co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Suicide and Self-harm in Middle-aged Adults. Dr Qin has been dedicated to suicide research for more than 25 years and has led a large amount of population studies. Her main focus of research has been quantitative investigation on contextual influence of multifactorial exposures on risk for suicidal behavior and follow-up care for people with deliberate self-harm.