Welcome to the Center for Mental Health Innovation!

The Center for Mental Health Innovation seeks to achieve breakthroughs in several areas of investigation: from genes to brain to behavior, and from fundamental clinical and mechanistic discovery to new approaches in clinical care. 

There is a mental health crisis in the United States, with one in four people experiencing a mental health problem at some point in their lives and mental health problems contributing to the largest source of disability in the world. The problem is enormous for all ages, but perhaps most for youth, who are experiencing unprecedented rises in mental health problems, including depression, ADHD, anxiety, and substance use, resulting in the declaration of a national emergency for child and adolescent mental health. The CMHI houses some of the most successful scientists in the nation working at multiple levels of child mental and behavioral health research at OHSU; with over fifty in-house staff and off-site collaborators, and $20 million of grant and philanthropic funding, we are uniquely poised to help to address this crisis.

Learn about our story, our "why" and our "how" on our About page. Details about the work of our investigators can be found on the Research Programs page. Our Team is committed to CMHI's mission of innovating the future of mental health and aspire to engage those with these same goals; Contact Us for more on how you can connect to our mission.

Join Us

Your contributions help advance all of this work—the cutting-edge discoveries of origins and course of mental health conditions that will inform new and effective prevention and intervention strategies for clinics and policy, new treatment development and testing, with an eye toward more precision, national and international collaborations, and creating the next generation of breakthroughs to solve the mental and behavioral health needs of our nation’s youth.

Learn how you can support the acceleration of our team’s successful and innovative research.  

Headshot of Bonnie Nagel

Bonnie Nagel, Ph.D.
Director, Center for Mental Health Innovation

Dr. Nagel is a licensed pediatric neuropsychologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University, where she serves as the Senior Associate Vice President for Research, Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Psychiatry, and directs the Center for Mental Health Innovation. Dr. Nagel's lab has been conducting longitudinal studies for nearly 20 years, with aims toward identifying biopsychosocial predictors of risk and resilience for psychopathology, including addiction, depression, and suicidality. This work, which has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health and philanthropy, is framed toward ultimately informing more targeted precision mental health intervention and problem prevention efforts. She is a Principal Investigator on several national multi-site projects toward that end, including the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study.

Joel Nigg Headshot with playground backdrop

Joel Nigg, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Center for Mental Health Innovation

Dr. Nigg is a Professor and Vice Chair for Psychology and Co-Director of the Center for Mental Health Innovation at Oregon Health & Science University. He obtained his A.B. at Harvard College, M.S.W. at The University of Michigan, and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a licensed clinical psychologist with clinical experience in multiple settings. He is a leading researcher in the area of developmental psychopathology with a focus on ADHD. He and his teams have published some 200 peer reviewed scientific papers in addition to numerous chapters, editorials, and commentaries; his work has been cited nearly 20,000 times in the literature. He is the author of 2 books on ADHD. His work has been funded continuously by NIMH for over 20 years. The recipient of several awards, he has served on the editorial boards of several leading scientific journals.