Scientific Director • Institute of Living
Vision for Scientific Leadership at the IOL
Reimagining behavioral health innovation with systems, story, and scale—so recovery is not an aspiration, but a measurable design principle embedded in every study, clinic, and community partnership.
From lived experience to lab architecture
My portfolio sits at the intersection of academic precision, trauma science, and narrative design. Every role—Penn, VA, RWJF, national media—has been a laboratory for building infrastructure that treats grief, bias, and trust as variables we can see, model, and repair.
Academic Precision
From Penn to the VA to RWJF, I have architected scalable, grant-producing systems that keep culture, ethics, and community voice at the center of design.
“I don’t just chase funding streams—I build platforms that make recovery a required deliverable.”
A Builder of Pathways, Not Just Programs
Ph.D. with cross-disciplinary roots in health equity, data, and psychosocial science. I specialize in turning isolated pilots into durable ecosystems that crosswalk scholarship, clinical practice, and community accountability.
“The work is successful when communities can feel the research in the way they heal.”
Systems + Storytelling
LiveLab Studios operate as narrative intelligence centers, powering trust metrics, engagement strategies, and qualitative datasets across dialysis centers, barbershops, classrooms, and congregations.
“Where people tell the truth about their pain is where our data should begin.”
LiveLab Narrative Intelligence
Our framework turns testimony into tagged, analyzable narratives that feed dashboards, grant justifications, and institutional decision-making. Media, metrics, and memory work together as a single recovery engine.
“Stories become protocols, and protocols become proof that the system can change.”
Center for Healing + Narrative Science
In the opening phase of scientific leadership, we prioritize system architecture before public output. This Center is designed to treat narrative intelligence and measurable recovery outcomes as co-equal variables in research design, clinical pathways, and community translation. The grid below captures flagship research, engagement, and scholar training lanes aligned to federal funding mechanisms and academic–community consortia models.
Federally Compliant Depression + Trauma Research Portfolio
A portfolio of flagship research programs aligned to NIH (NIMH, NICHD, NIMHD), HRSA (MCHB), CDC suicide prevention surveillance, Department of Labor workforce resilience modeling, Department of Education student-athlete pilots, and optional veteran-father subsets. These programs phenotype depression and trauma expression in fathers, athletes, and leaders, model cognitive performance decline under silent psychological load, and pilot community-held resilience circles governed by institutional authority, compliance, and auditable release scaffolding.
IOL-MH Fellowship
A 12–18 month cohort-based research and systems implementation fellowship with supervised clinical application and community placements. Pathways include academic discovery, community implementation science, and industry innovation/QI. The program emphasizes governance before scholar output, de-identified data access by default, and institutional authority anchoring all releases.
Data + Trauma Summer Research Pilots
Summer research architecture designed for psychiatry scholars working in trauma-affected populations. Focus areas include cognitive stress-load modeling, behavioral health surveillance design, narrative dataset tagging, and ethics + compliance frameworks that prepare scholars for federal funding and operations-level translation.
Town Halls + Narrative Intelligence Circuits
Structured community town halls, stakeholder listening tours, and trauma–trust audits that capture qualitative narratives as analyzable research inputs. Each convening is designed with oversight, inter-center coordination, and auditable release scaffolding for policy briefs, funding narratives, and operations relaunch alignment.
- Psychiatry Leadership
- Education & Research
- Olin Center
- Clinical Trials Unit
- Anxiety Disorders Center
- Racial Trauma & Community Healing
- Compliance + Data Governance
- ◆ Institution owns authority, liability, public voice
- ◆ MFA + Rotation SOWs + Data Governance v1
- ◆ Append-Only TSV logs (Turnstile)
- Fathers + caregivers
- Youth + Elite Athletes
- Workforce Leaders
- NIH / HRSA / CDC / DOL
- Independent Grant Lanes
Explore the portfolio behind this vision: training, grants, media, and systems design.
PACE is the operating model for turning vision into measurable practice.
This framework structures the Scientific Director portfolio into four execution pillars that align scholarship, care delivery, community trust, and policy translation. It is designed to produce fundable research, federally compliant implementation, and repeatable systems that scale across the Institute of Living and partner networks.
Build research-to-practice pathways that integrate trauma-informed workflows, implementation science, and evaluation into clinical operations—so innovation is adopted, audited, and sustained.
Develop scholars through structured mentorship, protected scope, and supervised application of evidence into practice. Fellows and trainees accelerate careers while the institution maintains authority, voice, and compliance.
Operationalize townhalls, listening sessions, and narrative salons as structured inputs for research design, implementation strategy, and community accountability—making engagement a measurable scientific asset.
Convert findings into policy briefs, testimony prep, partnership MOUs, and public mental health literacy, ensuring federally compliant dissemination and mission-aligned influence at scale.
Flagship Programs Built to Win Federal Scale
Six distinct, non-duplicative pillars that define the grant engine, scholar pipeline, and public trust infrastructure— designed for measurable outcomes and national visibility.
The D.A.D. Project: Fathers’ Mental Health & Family Stability
A federal-ready research and intervention portfolio on paternal depression, postpartum spillover trauma, and post-divorce silent risk windows—built to improve maternal recovery, reduce ACEs exposure, and advance national suicide prevention priorities.
Beyond the Buzzer: Athlete Depression & Identity Crash Science
Depression phenotyping and resilience infrastructure inside elite and student-athlete ecosystems—focused on post-competition risk windows, cognitive performance under load, and culturally competent pathways that normalize early treatment engagement at scale.
Load-Bearing Leaders: Workforce Cognitive Resilience Systems
A workforce performance research engine that models stress load as a measurable inhibitor of cognitive function, retention, and decision quality—paired with culture-engineered resilience circles and ROI-ready outputs for national employer and federal labor alignment.
Purple Rain & Medical Blues: Influence-Driven Behavior Change
A public-facing research and translation lane that studies how celebrity and elite-athlete disclosure shifts stigma, help-seeking, and suicide risk trajectories—building campaigns that move treatment engagement faster than institutions can alone.
Controversial Research Interest Group: Protected Scholarship Studio
A structured internal convening and governance mechanism for high-stakes topics—equipping investigators with legal-aware scaffolding, reputational resilience, and review pathways that protect science, strengthen messaging discipline, and prevent institutional exposure.
IOL-MH Fellowship & Summer Institute: The Scholar Production Pipeline
A cohort-based training engine that combines supervised application, implementation science, and data methods—paired with a summer institute model inspired by national programs—to rapidly grow grant-ready scholars, publishable outputs, and next-generation research leadership at IOL.
What IOL needs ↔ what this role delivers
Aligning Institute needs with Scientific Director delivery.
This grid makes the role legible: every strategic need at the Institute of Living is mapped directly to a proven capability I bring into the Scientific Director portfolio.
IOL needs a Scientific Director who can expand grants, philanthropic partnerships, and cross-institutional collaborations without sacrificing mission integrity.
$1.25M+ secured via NIH, RWJF, and major foundations, with platforms that integrate community voice, trauma science, and operational KPIs from the outset.
IOL needs a visible, credible hub for racial trauma, behavioral health, and recovery science that can stand alongside leading national centers.
Designed & executed LiveLab and Recovery Salons in 6+ cities, combining townhalls, data capture, and media strategy into a single, replicable research engine.
IOL needs scholarship that leaves the page: tools that convert studies into dashboards, indices, and interventions clinicians and communities can feel.
BHPHI Index, Data Trust Auditor, and storytelling-informed interventions that make trauma density, trust gaps, and recovery readiness legible in real time.
IOL needs a Scientific Director who can recruit, protect, and grow a pipeline of scholars committed to justice-centered behavioral health.
Built pathways that include K awardees, VA fellows, and DEI leaders, pairing methodological rigor with safety infrastructure for equity-focused scholarship.
IOL needs to be seen—and trusted—as a leader in trauma, equity, and recovery, locally and nationally.
Work cited by NBC, NPR, APA, and other national platforms; led townhalls and media campaigns that turn visibility into durable trust with patients, families, and clinicians.
What drives this vision
Designing behavioral health leadership around recovery, trauma, and story.
Our most vital health systems deserve more than innovation. They deserve precision, courage, and vision.
Recovery as a Design Principle
I build labs, dashboards, and townhalls that treat recovery as a measurable outcome—not an afterthought.
Trauma as a System Variable
Grief, stigma, and bias are not “soft” factors; they are structural inputs that can be modeled, funded, and repaired.
Story as Scientific Evidence
When patients, families, and communities tell us what hurts, they are giving us data. I design systems that listen and act.
A seven-year plan built as an operating system
Six phases that turn a national vision into an IOL powerhouse.
This is not a collection of projects. It is a sequenced build—governance to grants, grants to training, training to community trust, and trust to national replication. Each phase produces measurable outputs, expands capacity, and strengthens federal readiness.
Establish the Operating System
Lock the fundamentals that make scale safe: legal and compliance alignment, data governance, inter-center coordination, clear decision rights, and an execution cadence that turns strategy into weekly action.
Launch Flagship Research Programs
Stand up a federally compliant portfolio across fathers, athletes, and leaders: depression phenotyping, silent risk window detection, suicide prevention normalization, and resilience infrastructure pilots built for multi-agency funding and clinical translation.
Build the Fellowship + Mentorship Infrastructure
Formalize the IOL-MH Fellowship as a training engine with supervised application, auditable deliverables, and a mentorship network that accelerates junior faculty, produces competitive submissions, and grows institutional scientific depth.
Institutionalize Town Halls + Narrative Intelligence
Build recurring engagement circuits that convert community voice into research-grade inputs. Town halls, listening tours, and narrative salons become structured, governed, and measurable—feeding study design, policy briefs, and service line decision-making.
Launch Summer Research Programs
Create a summer research institute model that builds computational and policy fluency: surveillance design, ethics and compliance, stress-load modeling, and narrative dataset methods. Scholars leave certified, publishable, and prepared for federal mechanisms.
Replicate, Publish, and Lead Nationally
Convert IOL’s tools into replicable models: multi-site partnerships, national convenings, and measurable adoption. Publish the playbooks, train other systems, and position IOL as an architect of recovery science—not a participant.
Performance Benchmarks (Full KPI Matrix)
Gold-standard metrics aligned with NIH, RWJF, academic–community consortia, and national psychiatric research centers.
How this role operates in the real world
Precision meets purpose: systems, story, and scale in one portfolio.
This Scientific Director vision braids academic rigor, operational design, and narrative power into a single, accountable practice of leadership.
Academic Precision
Multimodal researcher, NIH/RWJF platform architect, $12M+ in research leadership.
I build systems that understand grief as a variable—and fund recovery as a deliverable.
From Grant Strategy to Measurable Recovery
Study design, data governance, and recovery endpoints are aligned from day one, so external funding and community benefit move in lockstep.
Precision here means every funded project is accountable to the people who live the data.
Systems + Storytelling
LiveLab Studios convert trauma into trust metrics, narrative into indexed data.
Our media labs run in barbershops, classrooms, dialysis centers—where people trust us first.
Narrative as a Live Data Feed
Story is captured, coded, and replayed as dashboards leaders can act on— turning qualitative testimony into quantitative readiness signals.
The spaces where people open up become the places where institutions learn to repair.
Equity-to-Action
Creator of the Referee Framework: strategic empathy tools for leaders translating DEI into operations.
Equity is a verb. My frameworks move it from keynote to KPI.
From Values Language to Operating Rules
Leaders receive playbooks that hard-wire fairness into hiring, referral patterns, incident response, and research participation—measured over time.
If equity doesn’t show up on a scorecard, it rarely shows up in the lived experience.
Organizational Turnaround
Led cross-sector recovery initiatives across six U.S. cities—integrating policy, healing, and story.
When institutions stall on equity, I bring a blueprint that builds and repairs in real time.
From Crisis to Credible Recovery
Governance, messaging, and community partnerships are aligned so that apologies, investments, and policy shifts land as credible repair—not just crisis management.
Turnaround work is only complete when communities can see themselves in the new design.
National Trust, Measured
National media, townhalls, and indices that track how trust moves with every intervention.
Visibility is not the goal—verified trust is.
A Reputation Engine for Healing Institutions
Benchmarking, dashboards, and narrative audits let IOL see how its work lands locally, regionally, and nationally—so every story told is backed by data.
When trust becomes a tracked asset, leadership decisions change.
Live Narrative Office Hours
Real voices. Real data. Real transformation.
This is a mockup of how we will communicate and store LiveLab sessions for fellows and collaborators—creating a practical, searchable library that helps people improve at 2am or 2pm without unnecessary process friction. Any protected information, sensitive content, or proprietary techniques will not be used in this library; only approved, de-identified, and training-safe materials will be included.
AI Note: Patient advocated for care navigator redesign.
AI Note: Recommended dual-role behavioral liaisons.
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📝 Transcription (Preview)
Training scholars who turn evidence into equity
The I AM Research Group is a living lab for health equity, narrative science, and policy practice. From classroom to capitol, we mentor students, scaffold careers, and design applied experiences that make inclusion the organizing principle of research—not an afterthought.
Mentoring the next generation of health equity leaders
Students in the I AM Research Group move beyond term papers and slide decks. They co-design surveys, moderate focus groups, and help build data stories that end up in clinics, community organizations, and board rooms. Our alumni step into medical school, nursing programs, doctoral training, public policy fellowships, and health system roles with a portfolio of real projects that already changed something for patients and communities.
Review panels, roundtables & national convenings
I AM Research treats professional service as curriculum. Our team contributes to journal review panels, advisory boards, and national working groups, giving students a front-row seat to how ideas become guidelines, grants, and practice standards. We extend this ethic of service to spaces like the American Nurses Association, specialty societies, and interdisciplinary equity commissions.
From social media feeds to legislative language
Our work shows up where decisions are made. The group has supported social media and digital storytelling for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Health Equity Roundtable, volunteered at the National Medical Association Meeting in Philadelphia, and contributed expertise that has been referenced in legislative documents. Students learn how a single brief, infographic, or thread can shift how leaders talk about justice.
Where health policy meets real people
I AM Research builds embedded learning experiences that make policy tangible. From collaborative health policy projects with the City of Denver, to hospitality and recovery-focused work with the Penn Transplant House, to facilitating Penn’s own Health Equity Roundtable, students see how research questions move through city halls, hospital corridors, and community partners. Every project returns to the same question: how does this decision land on a real body, in a real zip code?
Where chronic disease and trauma are modeled together
The Brain–Kidney Axis Lab
Chronic disease and trauma don’t just overlap—they speak to each other. We model how racial grief increases renal strain and neural inflammation.
This lab integrates narrative data, EHR analysis, and biosocial trauma markers. We track how stories of loss, racism, and chronic stress show up as patterns in dialysis chairs, waiting rooms, and imaging studies.
Axis Fellowship: An 18-month track for junior scholars researching trauma–comorbidity with precision and justice.
Why Choose Dr. Kevin Ahmaad Jenkins
Because this role demands more than a researcher. It demands a builder, a listener, a strategist, and a steward of recovery science. I bring a proven national portfolio—labs, grants, students, models, and systems—ready to scale at IOL.
See the Case for SelectionThe Case for Leadership
The Institute of Living deserves a Scientific Director who understands that trauma, trust, and healing must be engineered—not hoped for. My work unites rigorous science with narrative precision, institutional recovery, and a training pipeline that has formally developed 22 scholars from undergraduate to postdoc at Penn.
Proven National Impact
I have shaped research portfolios across Penn, the VA, RWJF, and national institutions—leading, supporting, or collaborating on more than $1.25M in funded research while building frameworks that strengthen equity, compliance, and institutional resilience.
A Real Training Pipeline
Leadership is not a title—it’s who you develop. Through the I AM Research Group, I have formally mentored and trained 22 rising scholars across disciplines, producing researchers who now serve in medicine, public health, policy, and behavioral science. IOL gains not just a director, but a pipeline.
Recovery as a System
I bring LiveLab Studios, the Behavioral Health Public Health Index, narrative diagnostics, and trauma-aware operational playbooks—tools that convert patient stories, community grief, and clinical realities into measurable recovery architecture.
Kevin communicated complex and consequential topics with clarity and authenticity. His sense of humor and insight made challenging issues easier to understand and act upon.— Past President, American Neurological Association
