Targeted Condition: PTSD

Workforce for Student Well-being Initiative (WSW)

In 2023, Washington state was awarded $6 million from the U.S. Department of Education to create a pipeline from Washington state’s five accredited Masters in Social Work training programs to K-12 schools. Called the Workforce for Student Well-being Initiative (WSW), 100 aspiring school social workers will receive conditional scholarships based on their financial need so the cost of getting an education is not a barrier to their getting an advanced degree and then committing to working in a high-need public or tribal school. The goal of the WSW is to help all K-12 students in Washington to thrive by advancing the careers of skilled school social work professionals through training and mentorship.

Washington State Behavioral Health-Student Assistance Program

The Washington State Behavioral Health Student Assistance Program (BH-SAP) is a research-based, statewide model that places trained Student Assistance Professionals (SAPs) in schools to deliver prevention, early intervention, and referral support within Washington’s Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework. Through our collaboration with the Assocation for Educational Service Districts, the UW SMART Center’s Training and Technical Assistance Core supports this project through program evaluation efforts including overseeing collection of student, school, and district outcome data, analyzing data, and producing reports to inform continuous improvement.​

Global Health Experiential Fellowship

The Global Health Experiential Fellowship (GHEF) is a Global South–North simultaneous training program that prepares students and early-career professionals to become global health researchers. Based in rural Uganda, the fellowship offers immersive, mentored experience in study design, data collection, implementation science, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Fellows contribute to ongoing community-based research alongside local partners, gaining practical skills in ethical engagement, cross-cultural research, and field-based methods. GHEF provides a distinctive opportunity to build research capacity, strengthen career development, and contribute to locally led global health initiatives through Empower Through Health.

Raising Washington

A partnership to provide comprehensive perinatal mental health and parenting support for the first 1,000 days

The Raising Washington Initiative seeks to develop an evidence-based fully integrated perinatal support program that will offer mental health care, parent training and support services for the first 1,000 days of a baby’s life (conception through child’s 2nd birthday) for every high-risk baby born in Washington. This will include creating care pathways informed by the needs of patients and providers, navigators to help guide families through the many care transitions in the perinatal period and accessible information to keep parents and babies healthy. 

To learn more this work, please contact Project Manager Lori Ferro, MHA at ljf9@uw.edu.

Empower Through Health

Empower Through Health (ETH) is a healthcare, research, and education 501c3 organization operating in rural eastern Uganda. ETH runs a health center that provides general medical care for surrounding communities and delivers psychiatric and neurological services across Buyende District (population >400,000). ETH’s research focuses on reducing demand-side barriers to care and partnering with existing community structures to improve mental health outcomes and support recovery after mental health crises. ETH hosts the Global Health Experiential Fellowship (GHEF), a hands-on training program that pairs Ugandan and U.S. trainees on community-engaged research. ETH is also expanding its education mission by launching a primary school to strengthen long-term community wellbeing.

Was it all a dream? Understanding sleep’s role in mediating psychiatric management in a rural outpatient setting 

Individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) commonly experience sleep disturbance. Such disturbances can have a birdrectional effect in those with PTSD –interrupted sleep due to hypervigilance and nightmares are common symptoms of PTSD, and poor sleep is associated with a worse course of PTSD. Sleep disturbance can potentially be a prognostic factor in overall outcome in those seeking treatment for PTSD.

Our proposed project will explore the effect of sleep quality on PTSD outcomes and assess the
effect of treatment of PTSD on patient-reported sleep quality.

Development of a task to measure the impact of PTSD symptoms on cognitive control and physiologic endpoints in response to interpersonal stressors

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is linked to altered physiologic functioning, including increased blood pressure and heart rate, especially in response to stressors. Increased cardiovascular reactivity to trauma-related stressors may link PTSD to poorer cardiovascular health and thus an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Prior work by our lab suggests that these effects of trauma may be due to persistent changes in the central and peripheral nervous systems’ stress-response system. While there is an urgent need to address these effects, limitations in our ability to effectively measure these changes have led to a paucity of data regarding the impact of current PTSD treatments on these important endpoints.

We propose to develop a novel emotional Stroop task that will quantify physiologic reactivity to interpersonal and affective cues, and quantify the impact of affective and physiologic reactivity on cognitive control. In a Veteran sample, we will characterize how performance on this task relates to PTSD symptom burden and physiologic reactivity to tilt-table testing, and gather pilot data assessing its response to pharmacologic treatment.

Subtyping the neurobiology of PTSD through novel methods for the alpha- and beta-adrenergic autonomic nervous system components: a pilot study

Trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are common in veteran and civilian populations. Meanwhile, observationally estimated half of people cared for at UW autonomic nervous system (ANS) disorder clinic have a history of trauma. Increasingly, research explains this observation through an evolving understanding of the complex interplay of peripheral and central catecholamine signaling that appear to underlie much of the persistent impact of trauma. An improved understanding of ANS changes in trauma and their relationship to the complex symptoms people experience is an important research frontiers to improve a) our understanding of PTSD, b) our ability to predict effective treatment for a given person, and c) the development of new treatments for PTSD. We propose implementing a novel analysis method for non-invasive autonomic testing in context of several clinical studies at VA Puget Sound. The proposed research aims to 1) make use of ANS testing results already available to provide quantitative data for adrenergic signaling, 2) test associations of extracted biomarkers with symptoms of PTSD, and 3) collect prospective data to test the relationship of peripheral autonomic signaling to quantitative measures of central nervous system (CNS) catecholamine signaling measured by event-related potential (ERP).

From symptom relief to subtype identification: exploring patterns of cannabis use in PTSD

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use often go hand in hand, with many people using substances like cannabis to manage their symptoms. This concept, known as the self-medication hypothesis, suggests that people might use cannabis differently depending on the nature of their symptoms. Symptoms are classically split into domains – hyperarousal, emotional numbing, re-experiencing, and avoidance. However, it remains unclear whether different patterns of cannabis use might correspond to specific symptom domains, which could reveal distinct clinical phenotypes of PTSD.

By analyzing data from the PREDICT clinical trial, this study will apply advanced statistical methods to identify unobservable (“latent”) factors that characterize cannabis use in individuals with PTSD and examine their relationship with symptom presentation. In statistics and psychometrics, latent refers to a variable that cannot be directly observed—such as internal motivations, behavioral tendencies, or physiological dependence—but which can be inferred from patterns in observed data (e.g., questionnaire responses). These patterns could offer insights into subgroups of people with PTSD who experience different symptom profiles, also known as phenotypes, and may respond to treatments in unique ways. Ultimately, this research could contribute to more personalized, targeted interventions for individuals living with PTSD.