Written by We are delighted to announce a new R01 from the NIMH to the lab of my co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Douglas Ruderfer, and my lab to fund research into better understanding clinical and genetic factors of risk of suicidal ideation (suicidal thoughts) and suicide attempts.
We partner with Dr. Adi Bejan at Vanderbilt, an expert in natural language processing, to improve our ascertainment of suicidality from electronic health records. Suicidal ideation, in particular, is often under-coded (not recorded in diagnostic codes even if it is discussed) and under-reported (symptoms not reported to providers or not documented by those providers). We intend to develop text mining methods to help us improve the under-coding problem and to identify more records with evidence of suicidality that will 1) improve existing predictive models and 2) help increase our effective sample size to conduct genetic analyses.
We are very fortunate to have Dr. Manuel Rivas, our colleague at Stanford University, as a Co-Investigator on this grant. He leads related analyses of clinical and genetic risk factors of suicidal thoughts and attempts in the UK Biobank, the independent validation data source in this study.
Walsh Science 
Fascinating. Have you applied to correctional setting?
Interested in discussing applications.