Social Welfare Professor Todd Franke and the Agile Visual Analytics Lab at UCLA Luskin have been awarded $1.8 million by the state’s Department of Public Health to evaluate two youth suicide prevention efforts in California. In response to an increase in youth suicide rates during the pandemic, California public health officials have launched two projects:

• A data-driven, targeted, community-based suicide prevention outreach campaign for youth at increased risk of suicide.
• A new approach to making youth suicide attempts reportable public health events to trigger crisis response efforts and allow support to be provided more readily at the local level for impacted schools and communities.

The funds will support evaluation of these programs led by Ashley Long, senior research associate at Agile Visual Analytics Lab. The lab was founded by Franke and Robert Blagg in 2014 to help provide stakeholders with data visualizations that meet diverse and dynamic information needs.