Victoria O’Keefe, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University Center for American Indian Health. She is a citizen of the Cherokee and Seminole Nations of Oklahoma, and an avid jingle dress dancer — which offers her a connection to healing that parallels her professional roles in the mental health field. O’Keefe is the first Native American woman to win the APA/American Psychological Association of Graduate Students Award for Distinguished Graduate Students in Professional Psychology, and is the first native woman in history to become a tenured professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
O’Keefe’s work with native communities and her devotion to indigenous representation, research, teaching, practice and advocacy has been invaluable. In particular, her research on Native American suicide prevention has been extremely impactful to indian country. Indigenous suicide prevention has been a focus of O’Keefe’s since she obtained her undergraduate degree in psychology from John Carroll University. In 2009, she became an American Indians into Psychology summer fellow; during this fellowship, O’Keefe became acutely aware of the need for further research on suicide prevention in native communities.
This awareness guided O’Keefe to the clinical psychology doctoral program at Oklahoma State University, which she graduated from in 2016. During her time as a doctoral student, O’Keefe worked in the laboratory for the study of suicide risk and resilience, was awarded the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, gave a TEDx talk on American Indian/Alaska Native suicide prevention, and mentored native undergraduate students. During her clinical internship at the Puget Sound VA, Seattle Division, she developed the first Native American Veteran Support Group.
Now, O’Keefe continues to work on native suicide prevention with plans to develop culturally-informed and strengths-based intervention programs collaboratively with Native American communities alongside the mental health team at the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health. She disseminates her research widely through academic publications (25 to date) and presentations at local, state, national and international meetings and conferences.