Her graduate training was funded by a NIMH grant in community mental health which laid the complementary groundwork for her second career as a Public Health Advisor at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (SAMHSA) She began her work at SAMHSA in 2008 where she developed her current specialty in suicide prevention, particularly in collegiate mental health and the prevention of suicide.

Rosalyn served as a Project Officer and Coordinator of the Garrett Lee Smith (GLS) Campus Suicide Prevention Grant Program for which annually a competitive call for applications was issued for campuses to be awarded funds to enhance student mental health through networking, training, education, and outreach efforts. Over the years, this program became an instrument of transformative change that saved the lives of countless college students and faculty across the country. This grant program shaped collegiate mental health efforts with opportunities to share experiences in national conferences, webinars and collegiate list-serves supported by SAMHSA and organized by Rosalyn and her teammates.  Rosalyn additionally developed high-level meetings at SAMHSA, inviting experts in the field to a meeting regarding collegiate mental health and substance misuse and another conference featuring subject matter experts to assist in providing wisdom for the development of the more recently re-written GLS Campus Suicide Prevention Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO), for example. Rosalyn was the Contracting Officer Representative for many years on the expansive 18-million-dollar evaluation contract of the GLS State and Tribal, the Campus, the Native Connections and the Crisis-Center Follow-up grant programs which provided seminal data to the field of suicide prevention.

Among Rosalyn’s other involvements in suicide prevention was the organization of the Expert Panel on the Deaths of Despair which included Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton and co-author Ann Case among other scholars in the field. She also oversaw the development of several toolkits including Promoting Emotional Health and Preventing Suicide: A Toolkit for Senior Living Communities, Promoting Emotional Health and Preventing Suicide:  A Toolkit for Senior Centers and Preventing Suicide: A Toolkit for High Schools. Rosalyn led an effort to advance a white paper on tele-mental health financing and she guided a unique contract across agencies in which SAMHSA created training in mental health for service providers within a grant program at the Administration for Community Living. She was often called upon to review relevant documents, participated in agency workgroups and created a list-serve for clinical specialists across SAMHSA and partner agencies to share resources for Continuing Education opportunities.

Adjectives describing Rosalyn and her work include transformative, dedicated, persistent, ahead of the curve, passionate, resourceful, thorough, graceful, and creative.

Rosalyn graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Social Welfare from Ohio State University and with a Master of Science degree in Social Work from Simmons College, now Simmons University.