Dr. Sarah Fatemeh Porter is a community-engaged behavioral health services researcher and critical suicidologist. Her research examines how community-led models of behavioral crisis services, such as peer support, provide essential alternatives for communities disproportionately harmed by systems meant to serve them. Dr. Porter's work across policy and practice is grounded in partnerships with experts in peer support frameworks that center lived experiences of psychiatric disability, serious mental illness, Madness, neurodivergence, and other experiences often excluded from service design and implementation. Ultimately, her work seeks to address disparities in access to, quality of, and outcomes from crisis systems by centering nuanced and culturally resonant models of care.
Dr. Porter draws on an interdisciplinary academic background in public mental health (MHS, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and social work (MSW and PhD, University of Washington, Seattle). Her scholarship is further grounded in direct clinical practice experience in street medicine and inpatient pediatric psychiatry.
Mentoring and Advising
Mentorship is a core aspect of Dr. Porter's work, and she welcomes the chance to support trainees at every stage of their training in the health and social sciences. She is especially interested in working with trainees drawn to critical suicidology, street medicine, and/or community-engaged models of behavioral crisis services. If you would like to explore mentoring or research opportunities with her, please get in touch by email.
Research interests
- Critical suicidology
- Behavioral crisis services
- Community-engaged research
- Street medicine
- Translational science
