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mHEALTH TRAINING INSTITUTE
Building the transdisciplinary scientists who will define the future of mobile health
The NIH-supported mHealth Training Institute (mHTI) is a national incubator for developing a new generation of scientists who can work fluently across medicine, behavioral science, public health, computer science, statistics, engineering, and implementation science.
These are the transdisciplinary mHealth “unicorns” the field increasingly demands. Researchers with deep disciplinary expertise, broad methodological fluency, a collaborative mindset, and the ability to transform rapidly expanding streams of digital data into rigorous, clinically meaningful interventions.
Through a highly selective national process, mHTI identifies faculty scholars with the talent and ambition to move mobile and digital health innovation from technological possibility to measurable health impact. Over nine years, the Institute has trained 262 scholars from 55 institutions, creating a national network of investigators working across disciplines, institutions, and health domains.
Supported through competitive NIH renewal by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), Office of Disease Prevention (ODP), and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) under R25 DA038167, mHTI combines structured virtual preparation with an intensive, week-long residential institute. Scholars work in multidisciplinary teams on consequential health problems, guided by nationally recognized faculty mentors and methodological experts.
The curriculum follows the full arc of rigorous digital health science. Scholars move from defining the health problem and identifying meaningful behavioral and physiological signals to designing studies, analyzing intensive longitudinal data, developing adaptive interventions, and planning for implementation in real-world settings. Training spans sensing and digital phenotyping, behavioral measurement, causal inference, adaptive and just-in-time interventions, artificial intelligence, implementation science, ethics, privacy, and the science of effective interdisciplinary collaboration.
The objective is not simply to teach researchers how to use emerging technologies. It is to develop scientists capable of asking the harder questions: Which signals actually matter? When is intervention warranted? How should an intervention adapt to an individual and context? And how do we establish that its effects are scientifically valid, clinically meaningful, and scalable?
mHTI itself is treated as an object of scientific study. Its training model is independently evaluated by the Center for Advanced Quantitative Methods at UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies, allowing the Institute to examine how interdisciplinary training changes scientific trajectories, collaborations, and research networks over time.
A 2025 longitudinal analysis examined 16,580 publications from 176 mHTI scholars and mapped their research trajectories before and after participation in the Institute. The analysis found that 63.8% of scholars shifted their research toward mHealth-dense areas within three years of training, with mHealth scholarship increasingly occupying a bridging position among clinical medicine, public health, behavioral science, and technological innovation.
This is ultimately the larger purpose of mHTI. Not simply to train individual investigators, but to build the connective tissue of digital health. To bring disciplines into sustained conversation, create durable scientific networks, and develop researchers capable of translating new forms of data and technology into better decisions, better interventions, and better health.
Vivek Shetty
Program Director
Related Publications:
mHEALTH TRAINING INSTITUTE
Program Philosophy
The mHTI 2.0 is a team science-driven program fostering both knowledge exchange and strong interpersonal relationships among transdisciplinary mHealth teams. As a multidisciplinary institute, it functions as a dual-purpose platform: an educational hub and a research laboratory for team science. By uniting scholars from various disciplines, it serves as a testbed to examine team dynamics, communication, and decision-making.
Educational researchers within the mHTI experiment with different team structures, implement strategies to enhance collaboration, and monitor team performance over time. The knowledge garnered from these studies informs the development of best practices for building and maintaining high-performing multidisciplinary research teams. These insights are used by NIH program offices to measure the impact of the training and develop future training programs.
mHEALTH TRAINING INSTITUTE
Program Structure
As a connector, incubator, and facilitator, the institute cultivates an environment where participants can freely share ideas, technologies, and frameworks, building trust and collaboration across disciplines. Through a blended learning approach, participants engage in intensive team-based projects alongside focused coursework. Multidisciplinary teams tackle real-world health challenges, developing innovative mHealth solutions guided by experienced faculty mentors who employ team science best practices. The curriculum covers essential mHealth domains, including behavior change, biosensing, digital biomarkers, human-centered design, advanced research methods, and machine learning.
Beyond technical skills, the program emphasizes soft skills crucial for transdisciplinary teamwork and career advancement. Regular social interactions strengthen bonds among participants, while ongoing feedback and faculty adjustments ensure program vitality. The mHealthHUB supports continued learning, mentorship, and collaboration among alumni.
mHEALTH TRAINING INSTITUTE
Impact
Over the past nine years, the mHTI has trained 262 faculty and future faculty from 55 institutions across the United States.
- Participants have reported significant gains in mHealth expertise, including advanced methodologies, technologies, and a deeper appreciation for interdisciplinary collaboration.
- The program has empowered trainees to initiate and sustain transdisciplinary mHealth research, expanding their professional networks and securing external funding for their projects.
- Strong alumni connections fostered by the mHTI have led to numerous productive collaborations.
- Recognized as a national leader in mHealth training, the program continues to expand its reach, with a growing number of applicants and the recent inclusion of international researchers in its cohort.
"It was a great opportunity to learn from the experts, make new friends, and enjoy brainstorming novel research ideas with cutting-edge mHealth technologies. I would highly recommend ealy career researchers working in mHealth to apply to this prestigious and highly competitive training program in the future."
- mHTI Alumnus
"The interactions with the mentors was the best part of the institute for me. They answered many of the pressing questions I had as a young researcher starting their career. The presentations about funding, building collaborations with folks of different backgrounds, and finding and holding onto positions were extremely helpful."
- mHTI Alumnus
"Coming into the institute, I felt very isolated at my home institution. I had very few collaborators in mHealth and very few mentors who had the knowledge I sought. After the institute, my eyes have been opened. […] Suddenly the research that I felt was impossible seems very possible."
- mHTI Alumnus
"The exercise of looking at the problem from different angles and through different disciplinary lenses then bringing everything together under a cohesive problem statement while highlighting the expertise of the team to address the problem."
- mHTI Alumnus
"In all the conversations I have with scholars, I heard that this was a really valuable experience for them, and several of them have told me that this was one of the most valuable things they have done professionally in their careers."
- mHTI Alumnus
"The ability to interact with different skill-sets but similar goals was invaluable. I have come to appreciate the diversity of backgrounds in the field of mHealth, and the necessity of different disciplines to form a successful mHealth team. In addition, the daily lectures were excellent - they covered a broad array of topics, but with the specificity that made them still useful."
- mHTI Alumnus
