Jessica Acolin
Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
University of Washington
CSDE Research Areas:
- Environments and Populations
- Health of People and Populations
Jessica Acolin's work centers on understanding how systemic, social, and environmental factors shape mental and behavioral health outcomes, with a particular interest in climate change impacts on youth and young adults. Dr. Acolin holds a PhD in Public Health (Health Services), postdoctoral training in psychiatry, and has over a decade of professional experience in mental health research and practice. She holds advanced expertise in quantitative epidemiologic methods appropriate for population health research (e.g., geospatial data analysis, multilevel models) and is developing skills in qualitative and mixed methods. Further, she strongly values interdisciplinary collaborations and is actively engaged with social scientists, clinicians, and climate scientists, among others. Her practice-oriented partnerships with local health jurisdictions are motivated by her commitment to ensuring her research results in real-world impact. She has 13 peer-reviewed manuscripts published or under review (7 first author), including in leading journals such as Social Science & Medicine and Prevention Science. Her current research focuses on climate change as an environmental stressor. To date, this work has resulted in 6 conference presentations (2 additional under review), 1 research manuscript under peer review, and 2 research manuscripts in preparation. She has served as Principal Investigator on multiple projects and has secured competitive funding, with over $70,000 awarded to date. She has experience with statistical methods appropriate for hierarchical or longitudinal data. She has worked with geocoded data, merged multi-level datasets, utilized generalized linear models, mixture models, and time-varying effects models, and Monte Carlo simulation models.