Rate My Professor Lauren Forrest

Lauren Forrest is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon, where she joined in 2024 and directs the Forrest Lab dedicated to predicting, treating, and preventing suicide and eating disorders. These conditions disproportionately impact certain groups, including girls, women, and the LGBTQIA+ community, and her research employs an intersectionality lens to identify at-risk subgroups and multilevel risk processes. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Miami University in 2020, where she also received her M.A. in 2015, following a B.S. in Psychology with honors from the University of Utah in 2012. Forrest completed her APA-accredited predoctoral clinical internship at Yale School of Medicine in 2020. Before her current role, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Penn State College of Medicine from 2021 to 2024 and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Yale School of Medicine from 2020 to 2021. Her work utilizes advanced quantitative methods, including machine learning, network analysis, and data-driven models, to address the complexity of suicide and eating disorders, such as structural processes contributing to eating disorder prevalence at intersections of gender, sexual orientation, and race, and person-specific suicide risk at intersections of rurality, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Forrest's key publications include "Intersectional prevalence of suicide ideation, plan, and attempt based on gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, and rurality" (JAMA Psychiatry, 2023), "Machine learning versus traditional regression models predicting treatment outcomes for binge-eating disorder from a randomized controlled trial" (Psychological Medicine, 2023), "Empirically determined severity levels for binge-eating disorder outperform existing severity classification schemes" (Psychological Medicine, 2022), and "Change in eating-disorder psychopathology network structure in patients with binge-eating disorder: Findings from treatment trial with 12-month follow-up" (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2022). She has been recognized as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science in 2025 and received the Outstanding Contributions to Research award from Penn State College of Medicine in 2023, along with other honors such as the Early Career Top-Scoring Paper at the International Conference on Eating Disorders in 2022. Her research has been funded by the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities, the American Psychological Association, the Academy for Eating Disorders, and the Military Suicide Research Consortium. Forrest serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Eating Disorders since 2022 and the associate editorial board of Behaviour Research and Therapy since 2023, and has contributed to scientific planning committees for the International Conference on Eating Disorders.