Kiera James is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Scholar in the NIH-funded Clinical and Translational Science Scholars Program (KL2) at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Binghamton University, her predoctoral clinical internship at Seattle Children’s Hospital through the University of Washington School of Medicine, and her post-doctoral training in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research takes a multi-modal, integrative approach to develop a mechanistic understanding of factors that drive the development and recurrence of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors (SITBs) during youth. Dr. James recently completed an F32 from the NIMH, which examined links between dyadic social communication during parent-teen interactions, day-to-day social connectedness, and suicidality in adolescent girls. She is currently funded by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to extend this work, as well as by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation to test the extent to which sustained attention to social threat information within working memory confers risk for suicide in adolescent girls.
