Michelle Moskos, PhD, MPH

Dr. Michelle Moskos received her Masters in Public Health and Health Services Administration through the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine in 1997 and her Doctorate through the Department of Health Promotion and Education in 2000 at the University of Utah.

In 2001, Dr. Moskos began working as a co-investigator for the Utah Youth Suicide Study with Dr. Doug Gray in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Utah. The study is in its 12th year, and Dr. Moskos is responsible for managing the current phase, a treatment study that provides rapid access to mental health services for teenage males in Third District Juvenile Court, those youth who are at highest risk for suicide in Utah.

In 2003, Dr. Moskos served as a consultant for American Association of Suicidology on the Training Services Group. The Training Services Group developed content and instructional materials for a web-based introductory course regarding the principles of suicide prevention and research for the national Suicide Prevention Resource Center. In 2004, AAS membership elected Dr. Moskos as an officer, currently she serves as Secretary for the Executive Committee, Board of Directors, and the Council of Delegates.

Dr. Moskos has extensive and relevant experience pertaining to current practice in the fields of public health program development, planning, implementation, and evaluation and youth suicide prevention, including the publication of suicide prevention in the context of government record and psychological autopsy studies. Dr. Moskos has 10 years of community-based experience with outpatient psychiatric patients, quantitative and qualitative evidence-based research design, implementation, evaluation of educational programs in both community and school settings, and both 6 years of advanced graduate level training and 10 years of work experience in conducting qualitative interviews and epidemiological studies in the university, government agency, and community mental health settings.

Dr. Moskos is a research instructor in the University of Utah School of Medicine, in the Department of Pediatrics, at the Intermountain Injury Control Research Center , with a career focus in Suicidology. Dr. Moskos has served as a Principal Investigator for the Utah Youth Suicide Study since 2001; this study was initiated in 1994 at the Utah Department of Health. In 2004, Dr. Moskos joined the faculty in the University of Utah School of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, at the Intermountain Injury Control Research Center to conduct further research in the field of suicide prevention. Consequently, the Utah Youth Suicide Study relocated to the Intermountain Injury Control Center with her. Currently, Dr. Moskos oversees both community-based interventions and all ongoing research activities of the study including: quantitative and qualitative data collection, coding, entry, analyses, interpretation, publication, IRB and expenditure approvals and budget monitoring, staff supervision, and monitoring progress on existing foundation grants. Dr. Moskos continues to publish seminal findings of the Utah Youth Suicide Study in peer-reviewed journals and presents regularly at local, regional, and national suicide prevention conferences.

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