Professional Background
Dr. Caine has served since 1996 as John Romano Professor and Chair, URMC Department of Psychiatry, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide (CSPS) since its founding in 1998. He has deep experience in the evaluation, management, and aftercare of 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. Dr. Caine has had continuous NIH funding since 1983. For nearly two decades, he has focused on public health approaches to suicide prevention, and has led these efforts through CSPS. He was PI of a NIH-supported collaborative consensus process on public health approaches to prevention, funded from 2001-05 by a coalition of NIMH, NIAAA, NIDA, NINR, NICHD, SAMSHA, and CDC, and 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. Dr. Caine led from 2004-2010 the NIMH/NIDA funded Center for Public Health and Population Interventions for Preventing Suicide, which spawned a wide variety of ongoing grants, and he now directs the CDC-funded Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention (ICRC-S), the only such center in the United States devoted to suicide prevention. Its mission is 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.
Since 2001, he has served as PI/PD of NIH Fogarty International Center 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. The ICOHRTA also has served as the foundation for the Asia-Pacific International Research and Education (ASPIRE) Network, which has been built on a series of pilot training efforts through a transitional group, the Sub-Mekong Region Mental Health Collaborative, which has involved participants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lao PDR – now leading to a group linking 11 countries, including China, Sub-Mekong nations, and a diverse array of LMICs in the Asia-Pacific region. The founding ASPIRE meeting was 14-15 April 2014, held in Hanoi, launched a regional collaborative network that supports evidence-based mental health services, based on research and education initiatives. ASPIRE already is developing "umbrella projects" that can generate better cross-national and cross-cultural understanding of how best to define, evaluate, and treat both common and serious mental health conditions, facilitate local efforts that are designed to address specific national needs, and serve as a foundation for ongoing training of early-career researchers. First generation projects involve research focusing on perinatal depression and the integration of mental health into primary care and community settings, reflecting priorities of the participants and growing from our "upstream" approach to prevention and early identification-intervention.