TDAI Core Faculty Macarius Donneyong, PhD, MPH, assistant professor in outcomes and translational sciences (Pharmacy) and health services management and policy (Public Health), is co-PI for a newly funded interdisciplinary team that also includes TDAI Core Faculty Xia Ning, PhD, associate professor of biomedical informatics (Medicine) and computer science and engineering (Engineering). Donneyong's co-PI on the project is Olivia Okereke, MD, Director of Geriatric Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Also on the team is TDAI affiliate Bo Lu, PhD, professor of biostatistics (Public Health).

The team received an Innovation Grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention for their proposal entitled Cohort survey-CMS data linkage for multi-level modeling and novel risk prediction of suicide in diverse older adults, for which the primary aims are to: 

1. determine the role of racial/ethnic disparities on risk of suicide; and
2. develop a machine learning-based risk prediction model for suicide events that is applicable to racially/ethnically diverse groups.

The two-year award supports projects that include data collection and two or more site contributing unique expertise.

"I believe that our success was enabled by the strong interdisciplinary team that we had put together," said Donneyong. As co-PIs, Dr. Okereke’s expertise in psychiatry and mine in pharmacoepidemiology and data analytics complemented each other perfectly for this grant mechanism. We also had complementary expertise in biostatistics and machine learning brought in by (OSU) collaborators Bo Lu (Biostatistics, College of Public Health) and Xia Ning (Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine), respectively."

"This is another great example of interdisciplinary research only possible with the unique contribution of each team member," said TDAI Director Tanya Berger-Wolf, PhD.