The Suicidology Lab at USU

A view of downtown Logan with USU and mountains in the background.

The Suicidology Lab at USU researches suicide and its prevention—including aspects of assessment, treatment, public health, and more. We have a particular focus on youth and young adult populations. Our ultimate goal is to help others build lives worth living.

Suicidology is a dynamic, interdisciplinary field that overlaps with many areas of psychology, psychiatry, social work, public health, sociology, legal studies, philosophy, applied statistics, and more. It also touches many related areas of study within health service psychology, including non-suicidal self-injury, mood disorders, behavior therapies, borderline personality disorder, and crisis states. We believe the overarching goal of this work is to help people build lives worth living.

The lab is run by Dr. Erik Reinbergs. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology within the school psychology program, a licensed psychologist, and a nationally certified school psychologist. Additionally, he supervises the adolescent DBT program at USU's Sorenson Center for Clinical Excellence. Prior to USU, Dr. Reinbergs was an assistant professor at the University of Houston Clear Lake. He earned his PhD from the University of Massachusetts and completed his internship year and postdoctoral fellowship at the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District. In addition to his research, he teaches graduate classes at USU for the school psychology program on school mental health assessment, school mental health intervention, and dialectical behavior therapy.

Lab members

In addition to Dr. Reinbergs, the lab consists of several graduate students from the school psychology program:

Tiffany Harris, first year PhD student in the school psychology program
Ellie Azamian, first year PhD student in the school psychology program

Lab alumni from UHCL:

Doctoral students: Jay Short, Carmen Ibarra, Mary Beth Morgan, Kelsey Bishop, and Charmaine Flakes
Masters or specialist degree students: Anara Makahani

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If you're interested in applying to the school psychology program at USU and joining the suicidology lab as a PhD student, please take a look at my prospective students page. There are currently no undergraduate openings in the lab. Occasionally there are roles for specialist-level students in the school psychology program, usually in supporting the research projects of PhD students in the lab.

Our work

You can find the lab's published work on Dr. Reinbergs's Google Scholar profile. Don't hesitate to email Dr. Reinbergs if you don't have access to any of the articles—he'd be happy to freely share them. We also post our data and code for publications on the Open Science Framework.

Since beginning at USU in the fall of 2024, the lab has:

Published four journal articles
Given five conference presentations
Submitted two grants as Co-I totaling nearly $1.4 million dollars
Collaborated with external groups such as the Utah School Mental Health Collaborative, the Utah Suicide Prevention Committee and Coalition, and the Jordan Elizabeth Harris Foundation
Helped organize a talk at USU on youth suicide by Dr. Michael Staley from the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner—with nearly 140 people attending
Peer reviewed 6 journal articles and many more conference presentations on suicide
Recruited two awesome PhD students!