Candidates for IASR Member-at-large

Candidate for Member-at-large: Olivia J. Kirtley, PhD

Olivia J. Kirtley, PhD
Center for Contextual Psychiatry
KU Leuven, Belgium

Candidacy Statement:

I have been passionately committed to suicide research since I was an undergraduate and over the years this commitment has crystalised into research interests in understanding the role of dynamic daily life processes in suicidal thoughts and behaviours, building ideation-to-action theories of suicide, and advancing methodological practices and rigor in suicide and clinical psychology research. As a PhD student and postdoc, I co- founded and co-chaired the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP) Early Career Group and since 2015, I have co-organised the highly successful Early Career Researcher (ECR) program at the biannual IASR-AFSP International Summit, which has grown from approximately 70 mentors and mentees in 2015 to over 100 in 2021. I am a member of the IASR membership committee and led the development of IASR’s short private online course series, where international experts gave bitesize video lectures on key topics in suicide research. Being actively involved in the IASR community has provided me with opportunities to build new networks and collaborations, and has given me important insights into core issues at the heart of suicide research and how we approach the scientific study of suicidal thoughts and behaviours.

Serving as “member at large” on the International Academy of Suicide Research (IASR) board would allow me to build on my previous work with IASR and IASP. My goals would be to grow the ECR presence within the organisation by expanding the range of training and mentorship activities, as well as to develop and contribute to initiatives to increase the diversity of IASR members more broadly — including by growing the membership of researchers from outside of the US and Europe. Such initiatives could include peer-mentoring (e.g., PhD students mentoring each other) and ‘transition mentoring’ (e.g., for those making PhD to postdoc or postdoc to faculty transitions). New training activities provided by IASR could include “soft” (e.g., peer-reviewing) as well as “hard” (e.g., statistics, open science) skills, which would contribute to fostering a collegial and constructive community of suicide researchers, engaged in rigorous scientific practice.

Qualifications and Career:

I completed my BSc in Psychology at the University of Stirling, and graduated with my PhD in Psychological Medicine from the Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory at the University of Glasgow in 2016. I went on to hold a postdoctoral position at the University of Glasgow, then moved to Belgium in 2016 where I completed postdoctoral fellowships at Ghent University and KU Leuven, before being appointed as a tenure-track Assistant Research Professor in the Center for Contextual Psychiatry at KU Leuven starting September 2023.

Currently, I co-lead the Center for Contextual Psychiatry at KU Leuven, a internationally-recognised centre of expertise in experience sampling (also known as ecological momentary assessment). Within our centre, I also co-lead research lines on suicide and non-suicidal self-injurious thoughts and behaviours, and experience sampling methodology, statistics, and meta-science. I have co-authored more than 60 articles, book chapters, and preprints on suicide, self-harm, youth mental health, and experience sampling, and am engaged in numerous national and international collaborations around suicide and self-harm, including the Lancet Commission on Self-Harm. I am a current member of the International Academy of Suicide Research, the International Association for Suicide Prevention, and the Association for Psychological Science. In addition to this, I am an open science advisor and consulting editor for Clinical Psychological Science, and serve on the editorial boards of Crisis and Infant and Child Development.

Research Interests:

My current research uses experience sampling methods (ESM) to investigate dynamic processes involved in ideation-to-action transitions in adolescents who think about and engage in suicidal behaviour, with a focus on social processes, future thinking, and exposure to suicidal behaviour. Following on from my PhD work on emotional and physical pain and self-harm, I have maintained a strong interest in investigating the relationship between pain experiences (both chronic and acute) and suicidal and non-suicidal self-injurious thoughts and behaviours. As well as my work in the suicide research domain, I also conduct research on youth mental health more broadly, mainly within the SIGMA study, a landmark longitudinal study of youth mental health and well-being using ESM in Flanders, Belgium, which I led. I also lead a number of projects to increase transparency and reproducibility in clinical psychology and ESM research, including designing a pre-registration template for experience sampling studies, leading the Experience Sampling Method Item Repository, and developing tools and tutorials about open science practices in suicide and longitudinal developmental psychology research.

Candidate for Member-at-large: Massimiliano Orri, PhD

Massimiliano Orri, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University
Researcher, McGill Group for Suicide Studies, Douglas Research Centre
Clinical Psychologist, Douglas Mental Health University Institute

Candidacy Statement:

I would like to express my interest in joining the IASR Board as a Member-at-large. I believe that my research, clinical, and academic work would qualify me for this position, which would allow me to extend my contribution to suicide research internationally. 

Qualifications and Career:

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and a Clinical Psychologist at the Depressive and Suicide Disorder clinic of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute (Montreal, Canada). I hold associate member appointments in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health (McGill University) and the Danish Research Institute for Suicide Prevention. I have received training in both Clinical Psychology (BSc and MSc at the University of Padova, Italy, and PhD at the University of Paris Descartes, France) and Public Health (MSc at University of Paris Sud), and I completed a postdoctoral fellowship in suicide research at McGill University under the mentorship of Dr. Gustavo Turecki and Dr. Marie-Claude Geoffroy.

Research Interests:

Excellence in suicide research is a key part of my professional agenda. I am a Principal Investigator of the McGill Group for Suicide Studies, at the Douglas Research Centre. My laboratory focuses on the epidemiology of suicidal behavior across the life course. My research is based on data from large longitudinal population-based data and build on several disciplines, including psychiatric epidemiology, developmental psychology, and behavioral genetics. I have made original contributions to scientific understanding of the developmental origins of suicide, providing evidence on the role of the early-life environment, childhood adversities, and developmental factors in the pathways leading to suicide. I received funding as a principal investigator from several funding agencies, including the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD), the Quebec Network for Suicide, Mood Disorders, and Related Disorders (RQSHA), and the MQ Foundation. My research has resulted in more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, and has been recognized by several prizes and awards.

I greatly appreciate the value of collaborating with colleagues with different expertise to creatively contribute to suicide research. Therefore, I invested considerable efforts in establishing a network of international collaborations with colleagues from numerous countries, including the Danish Research Institute for Suicide Prevention, the Suicide and Self-Harm Research group (University of Bristol, UK), the Suicide Prevention Center (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy), I have joined national and international suicide research and prevention associations (IASR, IASP, RQSHA), and I participate regularly in international meetings such as the IASR/AFSP summit.

I have a strong commitment to contributing to suicide research at the international level and to further strengthen my contribution to the field by being more closely implicated in the work of the IASR. Joining the IASR board as a Member-at-large would be an excellent opportunity for pursue this aim, and I believe that IASR would benefit from my motivation and strong commitment to push the field forward.