Jamie Zelazny

Dr. Zelazny has nearly 40 years of psychiatric nursing experience in clinical and research settings. Her research is focused on the use of technology to identify and manage suicidal thoughts and behavior in youth. She is the principal investigator of a R21 funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) entitled “Social Media as a Predictor of Proximal Risk in Youth Suicide Attempt”, which collects objective and subjective social media data to identify proximal predictors of risk in youth suicide attempters. She also serves as PI of a R34 titled “Geospatial and Ecological momentary assessment Technology and Activity Engagement (GET ActivE), a treatment development grant within the NIMH funded P50 “Enhancing Triage and Utilization for Depression and Emergent Suicidality (ETUDES) Center. GET ActivE aims to develop a behavioral activation app informed by mobile sensing data and facilitated by a health coach to increase activities designed to improve mood in a sample of at-risk adolescents. Dr. Zelazny also serves as co-PI on the ETUDES Methods Core study combining mobile sensing and social media data for the prediction of fluctuations in suicide risk in adolescents.

She is also a co-investigator on 3 additional NIMH funded studies: “The Role of Sleep Health in Proximal Suicide Risk among Ultra-High Risk Adolescents” (PIs: Tina Goldstein and Peter Franzen), a study comparing sleep-suicide associations and plausible affective, cognitive and arousal-related mechanisms using self-report, behavioral, lab task paradigms and physiology in adolescents at ultra-high risk for suicide; “Interpersonal Stress, Social Media, and Risk for Adolescent Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors” (MPIs: Nadine Melhem, Marta Pecina and Randy Auerbach), a study testing neural processes that increase adolescent susceptibility to negative social media exposures and identifying the pathways through which interpersonal stress resulting from negative social media exposures increases adolescent suicide risk; and, BRITE 2.0: A just-in-time adaptive intervention for suicide safety planning in adolescents, which aims to enhance the effectiveness of safety planning among at risk youth by developing and commercializing an augmented version of the BRITE smartphone app, which provides enhanced features to optimize effectiveness by addressing barriers to user engagement.

Dr. Zelazny is a co-developer of a supportive safety plan phone application for patients with high levels of suicidal ideation or recent suicidal behavior and a co-author of the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). In addition to these research interests, she has a strong interest in bioethics, specifically the protection of human subjects in research involving technology and in research involving suicidal individuals. Dr. Zelazny is a Vice Chair at the University of Pittsburgh Institutional Review Board.

Dr. Zelazny was the recipient of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association (APNA) 2024 Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship.