Taylor’s research interests are suicide prevention, particularly youth suicide prevention, mental health stigma, and access to behavioral health care. She is specifically interested in how to use research to inform policy to reduce the risk of suicide, mental health stigma, and ultimately disparities and barriers to accessing behavioral health care. Taylor received her Master’s degree in Human Development and Family Sciences and a Bachelor’s degree in Human Services from the University of Delaware. Taylor spent two years at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health working as the lead study coordinator for a SAMHSA funded project focused on improving mental health outcomes for youth seen in the pediatric emergency department for suicide risk, she also worked closely on a project focused on suicide risk screening for adolescents with neurodevelopmental disabilities and related disorders with colleagues at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Following her time at Johns Hopkins Taylor worked as an Evaluation Specialist for Forefront Suicide Prevention at The University of Washington.
(Training & Technical Assistance) As a key component of this mission, UW SMART has developed strategies and related infrastructure for providing training and technical assistance to state and local education agencies as well as individual school districts. The SMART Center’s “TACore” provides: 1) Training and consultation/coaching focused on developing workforce capacity (among school staff and community partners) to deliver research-based strategies, policies, and practice models relevant to the education context, 2) Technical assistance focused on building evidence-based, multi-tiered systems of school-based behavioral health, using collaborative decision-making processes guided by local data as well as research evidence, and 3) Program evaluation focused on collecting and analyzing existing (e.g., administrative datasets) and novel (e.g., surveys, focus groups) quantitative and qualitative data to determine the impact of new or existing programs, practices, and policies.