Professional Bio
Dr. Pisani earned a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia. He completed his predoctoral internship at the Children's Hospitals and Clinics in Minneapolis, and a clinical postdoctoral fellowship in Primary Care Family Psychology at the University of Rochester. In 2011, he completed an NIMH National Research Service Award (NRSA) suicide research fellowship at the UR Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide. He is currently a Clinical Translational Science Institute KL2 Scholar. Dr. Pisani is past director of Strong Family Therapy Services, the Psychosocial Medicine rotation in the UR Family Medicine residency, and the Developmental/Behavioral Pediatrics rotation for the Pediatrics residency.
Research Bio
Dr. Pisani developed and tested Commitment to Living: Understanding and Responding to Suicide Risk (CTL). CTL is a suicide risk management curriculum that prepares mental health professionals and service agencies to competently and compassionately meet the needs of individuals at risk for suicide. Supported by an NRSA fellowship, he published articles about clinician education and suicide prevention, including an article documenting the development and efficacy of CTL (Pisani, Cross, & Watts, & Conner, 2011) and a review describing the current state of workshop education in the assessment and management of suicide risk (Pisani, Gould, & Cross, 2011). Dr. Pisani is currently collaborating with colleagues to adapt CTL to the prepare health professionals to meet the specific challenges of addressing suicide risk among veterans and among cancer patients and survivors.
In 2011, Dr. Pisani was awarded a two-year KL2 career development grant by the UR Clinical and Translational Science Institute. The grant, titled "Help-seeking among suicidal adolescents: Testing the role of emotion regulation and connectedness with parents", is supporting Dr. Pisani's transition from clinical education scholarship to school-based youth suicide prevention research. Dr. Pisani has published two cross-sectional studies examining risk and protective processes hypothesized to increase adolescent help-seeking and reduce suicide attempts: help-seeking norms, emotion self-regulation skills and youth-adult communication. His empirical studies and school-based field work have stimulated new ideas for using mobile phones to prevent suicide in rural communities. Thanks to a mini-grant from the UR Committee for Interdisciplinary Studies, he has begun collaborating with colleagues in the Rochester Human-Computer Interaction Lab (Dept. of Computer Science) to prototype ideas for a text messaging intervention that could enhance key protective factors. To help inform the scientific development of these ideas, he is currently completing a study examining how teenagers with different risk factors use their mobile phones to seek support and advice. He plans to pursue a program of research focused on developing and testing mobile-mediated public health interventions to reduce youth suicide.
| Otto F. Thaler Teaching Development Award | Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester Medical Center | Rochester, NY |
2007 - 2008 |
| Research Fellowship | Center for Children, Families, and the Law | University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA |
2000 - 2001 |
| Hayes Scholarship for Graduate Study in Social Science | Bowdoin College | Brunswick, Maine |
1996 - 1997 |
| Summa Cum Laude | Bowdoin College | Brunswick, Maine |
1993 |
| Phi Beta Kappa | Phi Beta Kappa Society, Alpha Chapter | Brunswick, Maine |
1993 |
| Philip C. Bradley Prize in Spanish Language and Literature | Bowdoin College | Brunswick, Maine |
1993 |
2013 Jun
Pisani AR, Wyman PA, Petrova M, Schmeelk-Cone K, Goldston DB, Xia Y, Gould MS. "Emotion regulation difficulties, youth-adult relationships, and suicide attempts among high school students in underserved communities." Journal of youth and adolescence. 2013 Jun 0; 42(6):807-20. Epub 2012 Dec 18. |
2013 Jan
Conner KR, Wood J, Pisani AR, Kemp J. "Evaluation of a suicide prevention training curriculum for substance abuse treatment providers based on Treatment Improvement Protocol Number 50." Journal of substance abuse treatment. 2013 Jan 0; 44(1):13-6. Epub 2012 Mar 13. |
2012 Oct
Pisani AR, Schmeelk-Cone K, Gunzler D, Petrova M, Goldston DB, Tu X, Wyman PA. "Associations between suicidal high school students' help-seeking and their attitudes and perceptions of social environment." Journal of youth and adolescence. 2012 Oct 0; 41(10):1312-24. Epub 2012 May 06. |
2012 Apr
Schmeelk-Cone K, Pisani AR, Petrova M, Wyman PA. "Three scales assessing high school students' attitudes and perceived norms about seeking adult help for distress and suicide concerns." Suicide & life-threatening behavior. 2012 Apr 0; 42(2):157-72. Epub 2012 Feb 10. |
2012 Jan 1
Pisani AR, Cross WF, Watts A, Conner K. "Evaluation of the Commitment to Living (CTL) curriculum: a 3-hour training for mental health professionals to address suicide risk." Crisis. 2012 Jan 1; 33(1):30-8. |
