About

Dr. Alison Athey earned her B.A. in psychology from Boston College and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Case Western Reserve University under the mentorship of James Overholser, Ph.D., ABPP. She completed a predoctoral residency at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and an NIH T32 postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before joining the faculty, she was a Behavioral Scientist at the RAND Corporation and an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she helped develop psychological services for the school’s Bipolar Disorder Clinic. She is an affiliate of the Moll Institute for Mental Health and Wellbeing.

Dr. Athey directs the Sentinel Lab for Crisis Response and Recovery, which advances the science and practice of suicide and overdose prevention. A central thread of this work is caregivers, from families supporting loved ones through life-threatening crises to those left behind after a death. Her work spans psychiatric epidemiology, community-based participatory research, and intervention development, with particular emphasis on people bereaved by suicide and overdose, people involved in the criminal-legal system, Veterans, and firearm injury prevention. Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, including an NIH R61/R33 award studying prolonged grief and substance use among people bereaved by overdose, as well as by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which honored her with its Paula J. Clayton Early Career Research Grant Award.