Christian Cortes

Christian earned his B.S. in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego, where he specialized in Clinical Psychology and was selected as a STARTneuro Scholar through the NIH BP-ENDURE program. His early work included training in neuroscience methods followed by clinical research in the UCSD/VA Risbrough Lab, where he assessed PTSD risk in veterans and became interested in how people describe and revise their suicidal thinking.

Christian is currently a research assistant in the Nock Lab, where he contributes to projects that use technology to support clinical decision making about suicide risk. His research focuses on understanding how stress, emotion dynamics, cognitive vulnerability, and mental imagery shape short-term changes in suicidal thoughts. He is especially interested in using ecological momentary assessment, mixed methods, and computational approaches to identify within-person shifts in risk and to improve real-time suicide risk detection.