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.”
Why this Scientific Director seat looks different with me in it
My career has not followed the traditional academic arc. I’ve built labs inside Fortune 500 boardrooms, trauma-healing models inside barbershops, recovery dashboards inside dialysis centers, and data-ready narrative systems inside national media. IOL gains a Scientific Director whose work behaves like a bridge— connecting institutions that rarely sit at the same table, and converting that breadth into stronger science, clearer strategy, and deeper public trust.
Accelerate national visibility and high-value research pipelines
IOL needs recognizable scientific leadership—someone who can elevate the institution, attract competitive funding, and anchor its presence in national conversations on trauma, recovery, and psychiatric innovation.
I built national authority through award-winning scholarship, $1.25M+ in interdisciplinary grants, and a public voice trusted by NBC, NPR, and Congressional partners. My work routinely turns complex health issues into accessible narratives that resonate with funders, clinicians, and policymakers.
Build real partnerships across neighborhoods and health systems
IOL’s next phase requires a Scientific Director who can create durable, trust-based collaborations beyond the walls of the hospital—especially in communities most affected by trauma and chronic disease.
My partnership model spans caregivers, congregations, community health workers, dialysis centers, and barbershop circuits across six U.S. cities. These collaborations didn’t just convene people—they produced replicable research pathways, shared governance structures, and measurable recovery signals.
Convert research into operations, culture, and patient-level change
IOL needs a leader who can turn science into systems—where research doesn’t sit on a shelf but shapes pathways, accountability structures, training, and everyday practice.
From UPenn to the VA to multi-state hospital networks, I’ve built tools that redesign care: trauma indices adopted by service lines, referral pathways that shift based on recovery signals, and learning environments that make equity measurable and repeatable. My work consistently moves institutions from “projects” to performance systems.
Center for Healing + Narrative Science
At IOL, this vision crystallizes into a Center that treats narrative and recovery as co-equal with diagnosis and treatment. Each product card below represents a core asset in the Scientific Director portfolio.
BHPHI — Behavioral Health Public Health Index
A citywide index that tracks trauma, trust, and resilience at the zip-code level. BHPHI integrates EHR signals, community narratives, and psychosocial indicators into a single, visually rich score that leadership can read by neighborhood, service line, and demographic group—with LiveLab Studio visualizations updating in real time.
Controversial Researcher Recovery Program
An internal protection and restoration pipeline for researchers whose equity-focused or politically sensitive work exposes them to risk. The program offers recovery coaching, institutional backing, media and legal strategy, and leadership narratives that clearly state: IOL stands with courageous science.
Community Townhalls & Narrative Salons
Storytelling salons, recovery concerts, and trauma–trust audits across Hartford neighborhoods. Each convening feeds the Trauma & Trust Index, turning microphones and stages into structured inputs for research design, grant aims, and institutional accountability.
Benchmarked Center of Excellence
A comparative architecture that learns from Mass General’s Center for Cross-Cultural Student Emotional Wellness, Yale’s Program for Recovery & Community Health, and NYU’s McSilver Institute—then advances the field by anchoring those insights in narrative-backed recovery protocols, psychiatric depth, and measurable equity outcomes.
Explore the portfolio behind this vision: training, grants, media, and systems design.
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.
How the vision becomes an operating system
A six-step blueprint for turning behavioral health vision into measurable practice.
Each step is an activation point—from lab design to national platforms—that can be phased, funded, and evaluated. Together, they form a coherent operating system for trauma, recovery, and trust at the Institute of Living.
Build the Radical Recovery Lab
Design thinking meets data ethics; healing architecture meets analytics. The Lab becomes the physical and conceptual home for radical recovery science, where space, staffing, and study design are all wired to protect and restore.
Launch the Controversial Researcher Recovery Program
Safety infrastructure, advisory, and communications support for scholars targeted for equity work. The program protects careers, stabilizes labs, and signals that IOL stands with researchers doing courageous science.
Implement BHPHI: Behavioral Health Public Health Index
Real-time data on trauma density, trust gaps, and recovery readiness. BHPHI turns stories, encounters, and outcomes into an index leadership can track across units, neighborhoods, and time.
Activate Hartford Townhalls & Narrative Salons
Modeled on LiveLab’s barbershop healing circuits, Hartford townhalls and salons surface story-driven insights. They become recurring touchpoints where community voice is coded into the Lab’s data and IOL’s decision-making.
Crosswalk Yale, UCSF, RWJF Models
Strategic comparison and local implementation plan that respects IOL’s context. National exemplars are crosswalked with Hartford’s realities, producing a roadmap that is ambitious, realistic, and funded.
Scale to National Platforms & Keynotes
Disseminate tools via APA, ANA, AAMC, and regional consortia with measurable adoption. The Lab’s work becomes a beacon—with IOL seen not just as a participant, but as an architect of recovery science.
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.
Performance Benchmarks (Full KPI Matrix)
Gold-standard metrics aligned with NIH, RWJF, academic–community consortia, and national psychiatric research centers.
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.
Luxury-Grade Science, Built for Impact
Six flagship initiatives that position the Institute as a national studio for trauma, chronic disease, workforce performance, and ethical AI.
Brain–Kidney Axis Initiative
Exploring the underrecognized neuro-nephrological pathways in chronic disease, with implications for aging and equity-focused intervention models.
Safeguarding Bold Research
Guiding institutions in developing psychosocial protections for researchers investigating polarizing or high-risk topics, from racial trauma to institutional accountability.
Centers of Healing Science
Modeling after top-tier psychiatric units (e.g., IOL), we support systems in developing embedded research hubs that connect equity, neuroscience, and patient experience.
Mental Health Care Funnel
Collaborative strategies that direct community-based research findings into tiered psychiatric interventions—triaging urgent care, outpatient models, and community healing labs.
Neuroperformance in Workplaces
Deploying brain-based performance strategies to reduce burnout, support BIPOC staff resilience, and align organizational change with neuroscience.
AI + Mental Health Signal Labs
Integrating biometric signal labs and AI to track, assess, and intervene on stress, trauma, and recovery across high-stakes sectors—grounded in ethical design principles.
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
