Matthew K. Nock

Matthew K. Nock is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He leads the Nock Lab, focused on understanding self-destructive behaviors like suicide and self-injury. His work integrates epidemiology, lab experiments, and clinical studies, supported by grants from NIH, DoD, and private foundations. Nock holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (2003) and completed his clinical internship at Bellevue Hospital/NYU Child Study Center. His awards include the MacArthur Genius Grant (2011) and early career honors from APA and the American Association of Suicidology. He teaches courses on statistics, research methods, and cultural diversity at Harvard, earning multiple teaching awards.

Research Interests: Suicide Prevention, Self-Injury, Developmental Psychopathology. His lab employs mixed-methods and community-based research to address mental health disparities, leveraging AI, speech analysis, and digital phenotyping. Collaborations include MGH’s Center for Precision Psychiatry and Harvard’s Chan School. Current projects focus on causal inference in suicide prevention, cultural factors in mental health, and scalable interventions.

Grants & Awards: Over $10M in NIH/DoD funding; 100+ publications. Lab members include 12 research assistants, 8 grad students, and 5 postdocs (e.g., Jasmin Brooks Stephens, Chelsea Boccagno). The lab is expanding into global mental health surveys and psychedelic medicine research.