Administrative Core

The mission of the ETUDES Center is to augment the capacity of pediatric primary care (PPC) to detect suicidal risk and prevent suicidal behavior (SB) through the development, testing, and dissemination of tools to identify and manage suicidal youth. We focus on PPC because 80% of youth see their pediatrician on an annual basis, and increasingly youth are screened annually for depression and suicidal risk. We aim to address the challenge of adolescent suicide, which has increased across demographic groups. To achieve our goals, the Administrative Core (AC) convenes and supports an interdisciplinary team, inclusive of youth, caregivers, providers, and healthcare leaders, together with faculty with expertise in pediatrics, child psychiatry and psychology, intervention development, implementation science, health economics, bioinformatics, computer science, and statistics.

The AC is led by an Executive Committee that has strong representation of caregiver, pediatricians, and health care leaders, and has a strong representation of early career scientists (ECS). This multidisciplinary team, which no single project could support, is critical to accelerating progress in the identification and management of suicidal risk in PPC. The Specific Aims of the AC are to: (1) Set scientific priorities, provide oversight of projects, ensure human subjects’ protection, and support an annual evaluation by a Scientific Advisory Board and a twice-yearly review by a Data Safety Monitoring Board. During the annual review, we will discuss the recruitment of additional scholars; (2) Collaborate with stakeholders, namely, youth, caregivers, pediatric providers, practices, and healthcare systems in the development, implementation, and dissemination of Center products and findings.

We will continue to meet 3-4/times per year with each group of stakeholders. We are actively collaborating with our healthcare systems to deploy and disseminate Center tools, and have identified additional, lower-resource practice settings to test and validate these tools; (3) Support development of a multi-disciplinary cohort of ECS through pilot studies, innovation contests, mentorship and training. 14 of our faculty are ECS, with all ECS leading or co-leading a project or workgroup. We will recruit ECS from other institutions for 2-year fellowships with mentorship, training, and research support, prioritizing diverse ECS who show promise for future NIH funding, and focus on youth suicide. We will offer unique training relevant to youth suicide, including research ethics, and novel methods of assessment; and (4) Serve as a local and national resource for youth suicide prevention through dissemination of products, protocols, and findings, training, consultation, educational offerings, and liaison with local and national organizations and health systems.

All Center protocols, products, and trainings will be posted on our website.

Grant Number: 5P50MH115838-08
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: David Brent