Dr. Caine served from 1996-2017 as John Romano Professor and Chair, URMC Department of Psychiatry, and as Co-Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide (CSPS) since its founding in 1998. To give you a sense of his administrative background, the Department of Psychiatry grew from 58,000 to 200,000 outpatient visits, from 1700 to 2600 inpatients admissions, and to 12,000 emergency assessments annually, with the Chair functioning as the clinical, academic, and administrative lead.
During his career, Dr. Caine led three major research centers, including the CDC funded Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention (ICRC-S; 2012-present), the NIMH funded CRC for the Study of the Psychopathology of the Elderly (1986-1995), and the NIMH/NIDA developing suicide prevention research center, the Center for Public Health and Population Interventions for Preventing Suicide (PHP-Center; 2004-2010) – the latter serving as a foundation for the later ICRC-S. Each has comprised a diverse multidisciplinary group of investigators. Clinically, Dr. Caine has deep experience in the evaluation, management, and aftercare of seriously ill psychiatric patient, including acutely suicidal individuals, dating to the 1970s. In the past he worked as a year-round inpatient hospitalist for nearly a decade and as an outpatient psychiatrist for more than two decades. He participated in >100 psychological autopsies as part of a team that worked with the Office of the Medical Examiner, Monroe County, NY. More broadly, the Department developed under his direction an array of collaborative community clinical, research and training activities under the umbrella of “public health and preventive psychiatry.” In this vein, he has focused for more than two decades on public health and health system approaches to preventing suicide, suicide attempts, and risk-related adverse outcomes, in great measure by addressing “upstream” (aka, “distal”) risk and protective factors.
Dr. Caine was PI of a collaborative consensus process on public health approaches to suicide prevention, funded from 2001-05 by a coalition of NIMH, NIAAA, NIDA, NINR, NICHD, SAMSHA, and CDC. He was PI/PD for a NIMH Research Education Grant (R25) from 2005-10 that supported the training and development of multiple graduate and post-graduate suicide researchers, as well as community partnership teams, and the PI/PD for a NIMH NRSA from 1988-2003 and 1994-2014. The NIMH/NIDA funded PHP-Center spawned a wide variety of ongoing grants, as well as the VA VISN 2 Center of Excellence on Suicide Prevention. The ICRC-S, the only such center in the United States devoted specifically to suicide prevention, has sought to merge injury prevention and mental health perspectives to forge new public health, community-oriented approaches to preventing suicide, attempted suicide, and their antecedent risks.
From 2001-2017, Dr. Caine served as PI/PD for a series of NIH Fogarty International Center (FIC) training programs devoted to building collaborative infrastructure and preparing early career Chinese researchers devoted to suicide research and public health-population approaches to prevention – first funded as D43 “ICOHRTA” programs and more recently as a D43 NCD-LIFESPAN. He also was the recipient of a R25 from FIC to develop mHeath training and research, which ends in early 2020. While the current series of FIC projects are winding down, collaborations with colleagues in Asia are continuing.
Following his move to part-time status in July 2020, Dr. Caine will continue to mentor early-career faculty and select postdoctoral fellows, participate in research, publish, and continue policy-related consultation.