Dr. Jie Zhang is a SUNY Distinguished Professor, a tenured professor of epidemiology at SUNY Buffalo State University and the founding director of the Center for Suicide Prevention Research at Shandong University in China. He was educated in the United States of America with a Ph.D. degree in sociology. He was educated in China with an undergraduate degree and obtained a master’s degree in linguistics and a Ph.D. in sociology from Brigham Young University. In the past almost 30 years at Buffalo State, he received the SUNY Chancellor’s Awards in research, service, and teaching. His research and publications focus on sociology and suicidology. With a number of NIMH grants that allow him to study suicide in rural China, the USA, as well as other places of the world, Dr. Zhang with his multi-disciplinary background has managed to engage in dialogues with and represent a variety of research constituencies within the international community of suicide research and the theoretical developments. His 200+ publications both in English and Chinese also cover the elaborations of the Social Reference Theory in sociology and the Strain Theory of Suicide in Suicidology. He started the Center for China Studies at Buffalo State University in 2000 and has been the director since its inception.