Frese Lecture to address treatment and interventions for psychosis
Each year the Drs. Fred and Penny Frese Lecture welcomes a guest speaker with lived experience with schizophrenia to campus as an advocate for system change, and to give the medical community insight into their journey.
University of Pittsburgh professor, mental health researcher and community psychologist Nev Jones, Ph.D., will present as the featured lecturer this year in Watanakunakorn Auditorium at noon on Wednesday, May 20, 2026. Dr. Jones is strongly invested in increasing peer/service user involvement and leadership in research and policy and in tackling health-related structural inequalities.
Her areas of expertise include:
- Early intervention in psychosis/Coordinated Specialty Care for early psychosis, including research and interventions focused on improving longer-term social and functional outcomes
- Quality improvement and technology transfer within public sector community health services, particularly those focused on improving experiences and outcomes for individuals dealing with long-term psychiatric disabilities, including psychosis/schizophrenia
- Impacts of social determinants of health on trajectories in conditions traditionally labeled SMI across the areas of financial empowerment and economic mobility, service use, and involvement with the child welfare and juvenile/criminal legal systems, economic mobility and community integration
- The centering of mental health service user perspectives on intervention and system design, quality improvement, implementation and evaluation, including in the development and implementation of machine learning based algorithm decision systems
- Crisis response systems and the role and impact of police involvement, coercion and involuntary interventions, especially in the context of initial youth/young adult pathways into and through care
Dr. Jones has published widely on the socio-structural determinants of mental health/disability, SMI and SMI-focused services, and the peer support workforce and involvement with personal experience of psychiatric disabilities in research.
As a grad student, Dr. Jones reached out to Dr. Fred Frese to discuss Recovery From Schizophrenia: With Views of Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Others Diagnosed With This Disorder | Schizophrenia Bulletin | Oxford Academic, the paper that he co-authored. She remembers Dr. Frese fondly, saying “He was a natural mentor and didn’t hesitate to help and coach me.”
You may register to attend the lecture in-person or virtually. In-person attendees will have a chance to meet Dr. Jones as well as see some of the books featured from the Frese Book Collection on display from the NEOMED Library.