Dr. Jennifer Ma is an Early Career Researcher in suicide prevention, mental health, and wellbeing research. She received her PhD from the Centre for Mental Health Research at the Australian National University with the support of a 2015 ANU/ National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre for Research Excellence in Suicide Prevention (CRESP) scholarship.

Since 2019, Dr. Ma has held an honorary appointment as Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Faculty of Education at the University of Canberra. From 2020-21, she was employed at UC as a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Health (0.8FTE) and Faculty of Education (0.2FTE), serving as primary project support on an NHMRC partnership grant held with Lifeline Australia and on funded wellbeing education projects with school/ organisational partners. She is also co-director for the International Beliefs and Values Institute (IBAVI) Australian chapter at UC.

To date, Dr. Ma has been awarded over $560K in competitive funding (including Fellowships). Her research has contributed to testing of the Interpersonal Psychological Theory of Suicide (IPTS) model, the development and validation of a new measure for interpersonal suicide risk, investigating help seeking for suicidality and mental health problems, exploring consumer expectations of crisis lines (including the introduction of new technologies), and co-design research of local and international wellbeing education frameworks in schools and organisations. 

Currently, Dr. Ma is a Suicide Prevention Australia Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the ANU's Centre for Mental Health Research where her research aims to: (1) develop and expand evidence around the protective factors against suicide, with a particular focus on examining how interpersonal factors outlined by leading predictive models of suicide, such as social connectedness, can be effectively promoted in community contexts, (2) support the development of stakeholder-informed suicide prevention and intervention initiatives using participatory research methods with people with lived experience of suicide, and (3) refine suicide theory and models to better facilitate their translation in suicide prevention policy and practice.