Harvard University, MA
Matthew K. Nock, Ph.D. is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, serving as the Chair of the Department of Psychology from 2019-2025. He also holds appointments as a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and as a Research Scientist at Mass General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital. Professor Nock received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University (2003) and completed his clinical internship at Bellevue Hospital and the New York University Child Study Center (2003), joining Harvard’s faculty that same year. His research is aimed at advancing the understanding why people behave in ways that are harmful to themselves, with an emphasis on suicide and other forms of self-harm. His research is multi-disciplinary in nature and uses a range of methodological approaches (e.g., epidemiologic surveys, laboratory-based experiments, clinic-based studies, digital monitoring via smartphones and biosensors, and web- and social-media-based studies) to better understand how these behaviors develop, how to predict them, and how to prevent their occurrence. This work is funded by grants from the US National Institutes of Health, US Department of Defense, US Army, and private foundations and has been published in over 400 scientific papers. Nock’s work has been cited by other researchers >100,000 times, placing him on Clarivate’s list of the most highly cited researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry (top 0.1%) each year since 2016. The impact of Nock’s work has been recognized through the receipt of a MacArthur Fellowship (aka, “Genius Award”) as well as via career awards from the American Psychological Association, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and the American Association of Suicidology. At Harvard, Professor Nock has taught courses on statistics, research methods, self-destructive behaviors, and developmental psychopathology—for which he has received teaching and mentoring awards including the Roslyn Abramson Teaching Award, the Petra Shattuck Prize, and the Lawrence H. Cohen Outstanding Mentor Award.
Thursday, November 6, 2025
8:30 AM - 9:45 AM ET