TXST faculty member Megan Rogers honored with 2025 APS Rising Star Award among three recent accolades

One of her graduate students, Madison Risner, a second-year student in TXST’s master of arts in psychological research program, was also in attendance at the conference. She was awarded the Morton M. Silverman Student Paper Award for her manuscript “Empirical and theoretical overlap and distinctiveness of perceived burdensomeness and suicidal ideation.”

Additionally, one of her undergraduate students, Madeline Wootan, a senior in psychology, was recently awarded a 2025 TXST Undergraduate Research Fellowship for her project “Intimate partner violence and suicidal ideation: The roles of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness.”

In addition to the AAS award, Rogers’ paper, "Development and psychometric evaluation of the Psychological Closeness to Suicide Scale," was selected as Editor's Choice in a recent issue of Psychological Assessment.

Traditionally, suicide risk assessments and management focus on one’s physical proximity to suicide methods. Rogers and her team were interested in developing and validating a self-report measure that could be used to assess psychological closeness to a person’s preferred suicide method rather than physical distance.

“Over the past few years, I had conducted several preliminary studies showing strong signal and strong relationships between psychological closeness and increases in suicide thoughts, suicide intent, and suicidal behaviors,” she said. “We had a lot of evidence of its potential clinical utility, but we didn’t necessarily have a self-report or questionnaire to measure it. This paper had two samples of about 500 students and 280 community members, all of whom reported current suicidal ideation or had a lifetime suicide attempt.”

Now that Rogers and her team have the measure and results, they can continue a few studies to examine different aspects of psychological closeness and how it may relate to elevated suicide risk.

“We’re looking at how people’s self-reports of their psychological closeness actually relate to how they perform on lab-based behaviors, like attention tasks or interpretation tasks,” she said. “Do they have behavioral tendencies to approach or avoid those specific types of methods? Do they have disproportionate tendencies to engage when that method is present, or do they have difficulty disengaging? For our next steps, we’re going to collaborate with researchers at a couple of institutions to take this research to the lab.”

They also plan to expand their research by pursuing grant funding to better understand the experiences of psychological closeness to preferred suicide methods among service members and veterans.

Rogers was also nominated by a pair of her peers and awarded the APS Rising Star designation, an honor given to APS members who show promise of excellence in the early stages of their research careers.

Thomas Joiner, Ph.D., director of the Florida State University Psychology Clinic, was one of the nominators for Rogers.

“Megan is a, if not the leading, light in her generation of scientists, scholars, and clinicians focused on suicide prevention,” Joiner said. “Superbly talented people like Megan give me hope for the future of suicide prevention.”

While she’s focused on the work she’s doing in the suicide prevention field, Rogers called her string of awards “professionally and personally meaningful” to her.

“It’s an honor because it’s real recognition of all the hard work that I’ve been putting in for over a decade now in a number of different ways,” she said. “It’s not like you’re just turning your wheels for the sake of turning your wheels. I’m trying to do something that’s actually going to make a difference in people’s lives. It’s just validating to see the rigor of my work being recognized in this capacity.”