Summary:
Kacie Kelly oversees and manages policy, operational, and programmatic efforts on veteran health and well-being, including the Warrior Wellness Alliance. She manages strategic efforts to promote the partnerships, collaboration, and alignment among organizations that are so crucial to fostering the health and well-being of post-9/11 Veterans.
Prior to this role, Kacie served as the National Director for Public-Private Partnerships in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office for Suicide Prevention where she was responsible for developing a comprehensive and integrated public health approach to prevent suicide among the 14 million Veterans not engaged in VA healthcare. Throughout her 15-year career with VA, she led innovative programs to serve more Veterans and their families through strategic partnerships within government and across public and private sectors. In addition, she has had leading roles to promote military culture competence in the community, outreach efforts to reduce stigma associated with seeking mental healthcare, and to enhance provider proficiency in evidence-based mental health care. She earned her Master of Health Sciences (MHS) at Louisiana State University and has a Graduate Certificate in Women in Public Policy and Politics from the University of Massachusetts – Boston. Kacie has also been an active volunteer in the New Orleans community where she served as a Commissioner on the BioDistrict Board of New Orleans and on the Board of Directors for the American Red Cross.
Glen is the founder and CEO of Qntfy (pronounced “quantify”), a company devoted to scaling therapeutic impact by empowering mental health clinicians and patients with data science and technology. Qntfy brings a deep understanding of the underlying technology and an appreciation for the human processes these technologies need to fit in to in order to make an impact. Qntfy, in addition to providing analytic and software solutions, considers it a core mission to push the fundamental and applied research at the intersection of mental health and technology. Qntfy built the data donation site OurDataHelps.org to gather and curate the datasets needed to drive mental health research, working closely with the suicide prevention community. Qntfy was also 2015 Foundry Cup grand prize winner – a design competition seeking innovative approaches to diagnosing and treating PTSD.
Prior to starting Qntfy, Glen was the first full-time research scientist at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University where he joined in 2008. His research has focused on the creation and application of statistical pattern recognition techniques to large disparate data sets for addressing challenges of national importance. Oftentimes, the data of interest was human language content and associated metadata. Glen has shown particular acumen for enabling inference tasks that bring together diverse and noisy data. His work spans from principled exploratory data analysis, anomaly detection, graph theory, statistical inference and visualization.
Glen earned his Bachelors in Computer Science and Cognitive Psychology in 2003, a Masters in Psycholinguistics in 2005, and his Doctorate in Neuroscience in 2008, all from Northeastern University. As this suggests, his interests and knowledge are broad, from computer science and statistics to biology and psychology.
In this Episode, you will learn:
- Kacie’s background and experience
- The George W. Bush Institute military and veterans programs
- Glen’s background and his company, Qntfy
- The George W. Bush Institute Warrior Wellness Alliance
- Veteran archetypes identified through research
- the “I’m all in” veteran
- the “I’m broken” veteran
- the “I’m good” veteran
- Filling gaps between data and clinical mental health professionals
- Finding information about what interests veterans and where they can be found
- Applying the concept of market segmentation to mental health and wellness
- Ethics around data collection
- Warriors Connect Project
Links Mentioned In This Episode:
The George W. Bush Institute’s Warrior Wellness Alliance
Kacie on Twitter
Qntfy on Twitter
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Do you want to check out Duane’s latest book, Combat Vet Don’t Mean Crazy: Veteran Mental Health in Post-Military Life
