Where in the World is APF with Dr. Daniel Moriarity

Welcome to “Where in the World is APF”, our recipient highlight series where we catch up with our grant, scholarship, and award recipients all over the world!

Today, we’re speaking with Dr. Daniel Moriarity, who received a 2020 Visionary Grant for the project with Dr. Marin Kautz, “Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors in late Adolescents Following Childhood Maltreatment are Mediated by Enhanced Acute Stress Responsivity.”

Dr. Moriarity also received a 2020 COGDOP Graduate Student Scholarship for the project, “A Test of the Immunocognitive Model Using a Reward-Salient Stress Task.”

Can you give us an update on your career and research since being awarded a Visionary Grant in and COGDOP Scholarship 2020?

Since being awarded the APF Visionary Grant and APF COGDOP Scholarship, I have graduated with my PhD from Temple University and completed a joint postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA and Stanford. Starting January 2025 I will open the Precision Psychopathology and Dynamic Immunopsychiatry lab at the University of Pennsylvania where I will be an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Clinical Psychology area.

In what aspects has your APF-funded research impacted your career as a researcher and your contributions to the field? 

APF funding has been instrumental in my ability to develop an independent program of research during my training by allowing me to design projects that extend past the resources immediately available to me in my mentors’ labs. This has been critical for both my professional development and thinking programmatically as well as demonstrating my readiness for an independent research career.

Have you received subsequent funding, awards or other significant accomplishments since receiving your APF grant? 

Yes, in addition to my postdoctoral fellowship and faculty position, I have been awarded an NIMH funded F32 that builds off of my APF-funded research and was awarded the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research (an award celebrating the top 8 postdoctoral fellows across UCLA). Additionally, a manuscript testing the primary aim of my APF-funded research was recently accepted as a Stage 2 Registered Report in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science.

How did your APF-funded research positively influence or make significant contributions to the field of suicide prevention and awareness?

Dr. Marin Kautz and my APF Visionary grant incorporates several malleable intervention targets such as inflammation, threat sensitivity, and reward sensitivity into a multi-level model of risk and resilience for suicidal thoughts and behaviors in individuals with a history of childhood maltreatment. This work will contribute to holistic integration of early life adversity, cognitive traits, and biology in our understanding of suicidality and how it can be prevented.

How have you used the outcomes / How do you plan to use the outcomes from your APF-funded research to inform future projects or initiatives? 

The outcomes of these projects have been essential in publishing during graduate school and my postdoctoral fellowship. This data has also served as crucial pilot data for my next grants, including the F32 that funded my post-doctoral fellowship and allowed me to develop new mental health resources for college students at UCLA. Just this year I presented a talk at the Association for Psychological Science on the dynamic associations between social experiences and suicidality using my F32 data- informed by my initial experiences working with similar data in my APF-funded projects.

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