Jennifer L. Hughes, PhD, MPH

Associate Professor (Courtesy)
Health Behavior and Health Promotion


Office
Nationwide Children's Hospital Behavioral Health Pavilion, Suite 2A, 444 Butterfly Gardens Drive, Columbus, OH, 43215
Jennifer L. Hughes

Biography

Jennifer L. Hughes, PhD, MPH, is a psychologist and clinical scholar in behavioral health at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at The Ohio State University College of Medicine and the Division of Health Behavior and Health Promotion at the College of Public Health. Broadly, Dr. Hughes’s research explores the efficacy and effectiveness of psychosocial treatments for building resilience, the prevention and treatment of youth depression, and addressing suicide in youth.

Dr. Hughes is part of the Methods Core in the NIMH P50 Center for Accelerating Suicide Prevention in Real-world Settings (ASPIRES: PIs Jeff Bridge and Cynthia Fontanella), which aims to accelerate the development and use of effective interventions to reduce suicide in children and adolescents. Dr. Hughes is a co-developer of two evidence-based treatments, one for relapse prevention of depression in children and adolescents (Relapse Prevention CBT; Kennard, Hughes, & Foxwell, 2016) and one utilizing family-based CBT for suicidal youth and their parents (SAFETY; Asarnow et al., 2015, 2017, 2021; Hughes & Asarnow, 2022). Dr. Hughes is also the recipient of a young investigator grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to adapt and test an intervention designed to prevent future suicide attempts in adolescents.

Dr. Hughes’s most recent work has focused on universal suicide prevention in youth through a school-based mental health promotion and suicide prevention program called Youth Aware of Mental Health (YAM). She is an international trainer for YAM, working with the intervention developers to disseminate this program in the United States (Texas and Montana), Australia and India. Dr. Hughes is a past chair (2017-18) of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Child and Adolescent Depression Special Interest Group and has served as the newsletter editor (2017-21), APA convention program chair (2013-15), and member-at-large for science and practice (2023-26) for the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 53, Society for Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

Education

MPH
Global Public Health, UT Health Science Center at Houston
Postdoctoral Fellowship
Clinical Child Psychology, UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, 2013
PhD
Clinical Psychology, UT Southwestern Medical Center, 2010
BA
Psychology, Baylor University, 2003

Research interests

Youth suicide prevention, intervention development, implementation science, universal school-based youth suicide prevention, parent-based interventions, child and adolescent depression, depression and suicide prevention in primary care

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