Dr. Shetty is a Professor of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. An early mover in the mHealth space, he works on point of care technologies to facilitate informed clinical decision making and population health management. His research program has been funded continuously by NIH since 1993. Beyond his research and clinical roles, he is deeply involved in academic governance, having served as Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research, and a member of UCLA’s central Committee on Academic Personnel that makes the final tenure and promotion recommendations. Dr. Shetty has been a core faculty of the NIH’s mHealth Training Institutes since its inception in 2011 and also directs the training core of the Center of Excellence for Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge.

Dr. Shetty is a Distinguished Professor of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery and Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. An early mover in the mHealth space, he works on point-of-care technologies to facilitate informed clinical decision-making and population health management. His research program has been funded continuously by NIH since 1993. Beyond his research and clinical roles, he is deeply involved in academic governance, having served as Chair of the UCLA Academic Senate, as Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research, and as a member of UCLA’s central Tenure Committee. Dr. Shetty has been a core faculty of the NIH’s mHealth Training Institutes since its inception in 2011 and also directs the training core of the mDOT Center.

Santosh Kumar is Lillian & Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence Professor in Computer Science at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University in 2006, where his dissertation was awarded a Presidential fellowship. In 2010, the Popular Science magazine named him one of America’s ten most brilliant scientists under the age of 38 (called “Brilliant Ten”) for leading the AutoWitness GPS-less burglar tracking project and AutoSense wearable sensor project for mobile measurement of stress and addictive behaviors. His current research seeks to revolutionize the research and practice of healthcare via evidence-based innovation in wearable sensing and mobile phones. He is currently director of the NIH Center of Excellence in Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) and the NIH mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization & Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (mDOT).

Dr. Spring is a clinical health psychologist and Professor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology and Psychiatry at Northwestern University and Director of its Center for Behavior and Health - Institute for Public Health and Medicine. She studies technology-assisted interventions to promote healthy change in multiple chronic disease risk behaviors (e.g., poor quality diet, physical inactivity) in research that has been continuously NIH-funded for more than 30 years. Her ongoing mHealth trials aim to optimize dynamic treatment for obesity, use sensor data to trigger just-in-time intervention that pre-empts relapse to smoking, and characterize behavioral features that predict maintenance of healthy diet and physical activity changes. A past president of the Society for Behavioral Medicine (SBM), she received SBM’s Distinguished Research Mentor, Research to Practice Translation, Outstanding Optimization Research, and Distinguished Leadership awards, and is founding editor of its journal, Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research. A winner of The Obesity Society’s e-Health Pioneer Award, she previously chaired the American Heart Association’s Behavior Change Committee, the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs, and the NIH Psychosocial Risk and Disease Prevention standing study section.

Nabil Alshurafa is an Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine and of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California Los Angeles. He currently directs the NIH- and NSF-funded HABits Lab, which aims to bridge computer science and behavioral science research. His current research seeks to enable passive assessment of lifestyle habits with the goal of designing technology-supported lifestyle treatments for obesity, smoking cessation, and mental health. His long-term goal is to design mobile health systems that combine machine learning and wearable sensors to understand human behaviors in their natural setting, as well as psychological state and environmental context, with the ultimate goal of designing interventions that help manage symptoms, prevent illness, and improve health and well-being.

Julie A. Kientz is a Professor and Chair of the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she directs the Computing for Healthy Living and Learning Lab. Dr. Kientz’s primary research areas are in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Health Informatics, Ubiquitous Computing, and Interaction Design & Children. Her research focuses on understanding and reducing the user burdens of interactive technologies for health, education, and families through the design of future applications. Her primary research methods involve human-centered design, technology development, and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. She has designed, developed, and evaluated mobile, sensor, and social applications for numerous areas in the health, education, and family domains. The populations she has designed with in her research include individuals and families managing sleep health, parents of young children monitoring developmental progress, families managing screen time and remote learning, adolescents managing stress, and inclusive education teachers and therapists working with neurodiverse children. Dr. Kientz received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. She was awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2009), named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 award (2013), and is the only faculty member in the UW College of Engineering to receive both the Faculty Research Innovator (2014) and Teaching Innovator (2019) awards. Her research has been featured in a number of media outlets, including the NY Times, Parent magazine, the Atlantic, Geekwire, Time magazine, ABC News, and USA Today.

Dr. Susan Murphy is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Statistics and Computer Science, and the Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. She directs the Statistical Reinforcement Learning Lab at Harvard University. Her research concerns clinical trial design and the development of data analytic methods for informing multi-stage decision making in health. In particular for (1) constructing individualized sequences of treatments (a.k.a., adaptive interventions) for use in informing clinical decision making and (2) constructing real-time individualized sequences of treatments (a.k.a., Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions) delivered by mobile devices. Murphy has developed a formal model of this decision-making process and an innovative design for clinical trials called Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial (SMART) that allow researchers to optimize adaptive interventions. In 2016, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, in 2014, she was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2013, she was selected as a MacArthur Fellow

Dr. Spring is a clinical health psychologist and Professor of Preventive Medicine, Psychology and Psychiatry at Northwestern University and Director of its Center for Behavior and Health - Institute for Public Health and Medicine. She studies technology-assisted interventions to promote healthy change in multiple chronic disease risk behaviors (e.g., poor quality diet, physical inactivity) in research that has been continuously NIH-funded for more than 30 years. Her ongoing mHealth trials aim to optimize dynamic treatment for obesity, use sensor data to trigger just-in-time intervention that pre-empts relapse to smoking, and characterize behavioral features that predict maintenance of healthy diet and physical activity changes. A past president of the Society for Behavioral Medicine (SBM), she received SBM’s Distinguished Research Mentor, Research to Practice Translation, Outstanding Optimization Research, and Distinguished Leadership awards, and is founding editor of its journal, Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research. A winner of The Obesity Society’s e-Health Pioneer Award, she previously chaired the American Heart Association’s Behavior Change Committee, the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs, and the NIH Psychosocial Risk and Disease Prevention standing study section.

Walter Dempsey is an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Assistant Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research. His research focuses on statistical methods for digital and mobile health. His current work involves three complementary research themes: (1) experimental design and data analytic methods to inform multi-stage decision making in health; (2) statistical modeling of complex longitudinal and survival data; and (3) statistical modeling of complex relational structures such as interaction networks. In the coming years, he will continue to design and apply novel statistical methodologies to make sense of complex longitudinal, survival, and relational datasets. This work will inform decision-making in health by aiding in intervention evaluation and development. Prior to joining, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University where he worked within the Statistical Reinforcement Learning Lab under the supervision of Susan Murphy. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Peter McCullagh.

Predrag (Pedja) Klasnja is an associate professor at the School of Information and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. He is a member of the Michigan Interactive & Social Computing group, an interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in human-computer interaction and social computing. Dr. Klasnja received a PhD in information science from the Information School at the University of Washington. He then served as a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington. Dr. Klasnja joined the SI faculty in July 2012, and his areas of interest include human-computer interaction, health informatics, and mobile computing.

Inbal (Billie) Nahum-Shani is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Research and a co-director of the d3lab (Data Science for Dynamic intervention Decision-making lab) at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on conceptual and methodological issues relating to building effective Adaptive Interventions—a treatment design in which ongoing information from the person is used to individualize the type/dose/modality of support (or treatment); and just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) —a special form of adaptive interventions in which mobile devices are used to provide support in a timely and ecological manner. Of particular interest are JITAIs aiming to engage participants in treatment. Much of her research focuses on developing methodologies relating to factorial designs, sequential multiple assignment randomized trials (SMARTs) and micro-randomized trials (MRTs).

Bonnie T. Zima, MD, MPH is Professor-in-Residence in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Associate Director of the UCLA Center for Health Services and Society. Dr. Zima’s research is dedicated to improving the quality of child mental health care, with priority placed on children enrolled in Medicaid-funded outpatient programs and underserved, at risk child populations. Her research spans national pediatric hospitalization resource utilization and costs, validity of national quality measures, pediatric integrated care models, pediatric workforce development, and use of telehealth and mobile health technologies. She is Principal Investigator (PI) of a five-year study to pilot test integrated care models for children in two federally qualified health care centers in Chicago, an ongoing study that developed and pilot-tested MH2™, Mobile Health for Mental Health, a web-based application to optimize stimulant medication treatment for children with ADHD. Dr. Zima is also Co-Investigator on a three-year PCORI-funded randomized trial of a telehealth intervention to improve access to community-based child mental health programs from pediatric primary care clinics, a 5-year SAMHSA-funded intervention to improve pediatric work force training related to child complex trauma, lead child psychiatrist on the California Performance Outcomes Measures Study, and core PI for a recently funded five-year study examining the impact of child crisis intervention programs in 16 California counties. Her research has received all three national research awards from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP).

Santosh Kumar is Lillian & Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence Professor in Computer Science at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University in 2006, where his dissertation was awarded a Presidential fellowship. In 2010, the Popular Science magazine named him one of America’s ten most brilliant scientists under the age of 38 (called “Brilliant Ten”) for leading the AutoWitness GPS-less burglar tracking project and AutoSense wearable sensor project for mobile measurement of stress and addictive behaviors. His current research seeks to revolutionize the research and practice of healthcare via evidence-based innovation in wearable sensing and mobile phones. He is currently director of the NIH Center of Excellence in Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) and the NIH mHealth Center for Discovery, Optimization & Translation of Temporally-Precise Interventions (mDOT).

Dr. Pfammatter is a Licensed Clinical Health Psychologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She has an extensive background teaching graduate students and junior investigators in best practices for conducting team science. She is also an experienced facilitator of team science workshops focused on team assembly, launch, and maturation. Dr. Pfammatter’s wide range of research interests center around exploring the optimization of health behavior change to treat and prevent chronic conditions such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, including investigating technology supported interventions for the purpose of health behavior change. Specifically, Dr. Pfammatter develops smartphone applications, explores the use of wireless sensors, and investigates behavioral mechanisms that support positive health outcomes in adults.

Dr. Eric Hekler, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Family Medicine & Public Health in the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the Director of the Center for Wireless & Population Health Systems within the Qualcomm Institute at UCSD, and the faculty member of the Design Lab at UCSD. His research is broadly focused on advancing methods in the design, creation, optimization, evaluation, and reuse (scaling up and out) of digital health technologies. His goal is to contribute towards a form of applied science that facilitates equitable participation, contribution, and benefit for all. There are three interdependent themes to his research, advancing: 1) methods for optimizing adaptive behavioral interventions; 2) methods and processes to help people and communities help themselves: and 3) research pipelines to achieve efficient, rigorous, context-relevant solutions for complex problems, a domain he and his colleagues have called agile science. He has over 100 publications that span the many disciplines he contributes and has an active federal and foundation funding. He is recognized internationally as an expert in the area of digital health.

Vickie Mays is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the UCLA Center on Research, Education, Training and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities (www.MinorityHealthDisparities.org). Professor Mays' research primarily focuses on the mental and physical health disparities affecting racial and ethnic minority populations. She has a long history of research and policy development in the area of contextual factors that surrounding HIV/AIDS in racial and ethnic minorities. Her mental health research examines availability, access and quality of mental health services for racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. She is the Co-PI of the California Quality of Life Survey, a population based study of over 2,200 Californians on the prevalence of mental health disorders and the contextual factors associated with those disorders. She has received a number of awards including one for her lifetime research on women and HIV from AMFAR, a Women and Leadership Award from the American Psychological Association and several Distinguished Contributions for Research awards.

Dr. James Rehg is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he co-Directs the Center for Health Analytics and Informatics (CHAI). He received his Ph.D. from CMU in 1995 and worked at the Cambridge Research Lab of DEC (and then Compaq) from 1995-2001, where he managed the computer vision research group. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2001 and a Raytheon Faculty Fellowship from Georgia Tech in 2005. He and his students have received a number of best paper awards, including best student paper awards at ICML 2005, BMVC 2010, Mobihealth 2014, Face and Gesture 2015, and a 2018 Distinguished Paper Award from ACM IMWUT and a Method of the Year award from Nature Methods. Dr. Rehg served as the General co-Chair for CVPR 2009 and the Program co-Chair for CVPR 2017. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and holds 26 issued US patents.

NIH Funding Insights: Behavioral Therapy Development, Substance Use Disorders Dr. Alkin is director of the Behavioral Therapy Development Program (BTDP) within the Division of Therapeutics and Medical Consequences at NIDA. The overarching goal of BTDP is to produce efficacious, implementable and self-sustaining treatments for substance use disorders. BTDP supports Stage I (treatment generation, refinement), Stage II (efficacy), and Stage III (efficacy in the real-world) research. Research areas supported by BTDP include development of treatments targeting specific novel or insufficiently-studied behavioral and neurobehavioral processes (e.g., impulsivity, risk-taking propensity, decision-making), the examination of theory-derived treatment targets and mechanisms of behavior change, adherence, and studies that integrate behavioral/pharmacological, technology- and neuromodulatory-based treatment. Dr. Aklin received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Maryland. He completed his clinical residency at Yale University School of Medicine, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine—Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit. He has received numerous awards and honors, including Early Career Investigator Awards from the College on Problem of Drug Dependence (CPDD) and the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT). Dr. Aklin’s areas of research include the development of treatments targeting specific neurobehavioral processes (e.g., impulsivity, risk-taking, decision-making), the examination of theory-derived treatment targets and mechanisms of behavior change, adherence, and studies that integrate behavioral/pharmacological treatment. Dr. Aklin has extensive clinical research experience in behavioral and cognitive-behavioral treatment for substance dependence; adaptive brief interventions and adherence trials. He joined NIDA in 2008.

Richard Conroy, Ph.D., M.B.A., joined the NIH Office of Strategic Coordination in 2017 and leads a number of trans-NIH Common Fund programs, including HuBMAP and SMaHT, as well as participating in a number of initiatives including Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID (PASC) and RADx-Tech. Prior to joining the Office, Richard was the Director of the Division of Applied Science and Technology at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), where we oversaw the institute’s portfolio of programs in biomedical imaging. Richard received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews and MBA from the University of Maryland Global Campus.

Dr. Maggie Sweeney is a Program Officer within the Division of Services and Intervention Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). She has a dual role with the Office of Research Training and Career Development and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. She is also a member of the NIMH Disparities Team, whose mission is to promote innovative research to enhance understanding of mental health disparities and minority mental health, and to reduce mental health disparities and promote mental health equity. Dr. Sweeney has given invited presentations to academic and lay audiences, including at community clinics and community advocacy leadership development training programs. Before joining NIMH in 2022, Dr. Sweeney was an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her prior research applied learning and reinforcement processes to develop and test behavioral and pharmacological treatments in real-world implementation settings. Her position at NIMH leverages her prior experiences with clinical trials, digital therapeutics, and small business collaboration. Dr. Sweeney completed her postdoctoral training at the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins University, and she obtained her doctoral degree in Experimental and Applied Psychological Science from Utah State University.

NIH / NCATS Funding Insights: Translational Science Dr. Audie Atienza is a senior program officer at the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), National Institutes of Health (NIH). Prior to joining NCATS, Dr. Atienza served as a senior program officer at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and National Cancer Institute (NCI). He previously worked on special assignments to the NIH Office of the Director and to the HHS Immediate Office of the Secretary as a senior advisor. He has collaborated with the White House (OSTP, VPOTUS, FLOTUS), Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, and Office of the Chief Privacy Officer. Dr. Atienza has contributed to various NIH-wide research efforts including the NIH Roadmap Initiative; NIH Genes, Environment and Health Initiative (GEI); mHealth Summit; NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative; and the NIH REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative.

Dr. Ilana Goldberg joined the NIH in 2019 as a AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). She served as a Program Director and had oversight of the small business portfolio and entrepreneur training program, C3i. In addition, she is a project manager for the RADx Tech initiative and started a Technology for Maternal Health Initiative at NIBIB. In 2022 Dr. Goldberg joined NHLBI in the Division of Blood Diseases and Resources (DBDR). Dr. Goldberg earned her B.S. degree from Brandeis University in Chemistry and Biochemistry, where she gained expertise in protein crystallography. She earned her Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University in materials chemistry where she focused on the crystal growth of secondary explosives. In 2005 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study crystal engineering, polymorphism, and co-crystallization of small molecules at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, Israel. Prior to her NIH position she was a project manager in Global Medical Excellence for AstraZeneca. Dr. Goldberg spent five years as senior scientist and project manager at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory where she managed multidisciplinary research projects for homeland security. Before that, she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Transportation Security Laboratory in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where she focused on the development of thermal analysis methods for energetic materials as well as the advancement of explosive detection technologies. Dr. Goldberg is committed to supporting the development of biomedical technologies that enhance public health.

NIH Funding Insights: Small Business, Innovation Research, Nursing Research Dr. Bough is the Director of NINR’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program and oversees a diverse portfolio of healthcare technologies. Prior to joining NIH, Dr. Bough was a Program Director at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for 12 years where he oversaw SBIR/STTR and research project grants focused on the discovery of new therapeutics for addiction (2008-2020). Prior to joining NIDA, Dr. Bough worked as a clinical pharmacologist at the US Food & Drug Administration/Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (2005-2008). He is interested in the development of innovative digital health and AI-based technologies to improve healthcare. Dr. Bough holds a B.S. degree in Biology from Gettysburg College and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Biology (neuroscience) from Georgetown University.

Dr. Adam Haim is the Chief of the Treatment and Preventive Intervention Research Branch and the Chief of the Small Business Innovation Research and the Small Business Technology Transfer program within the Division of Services and Intervention Research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Dr. Haim provides institute wide leadership in intervention science, including research focused on enhancing and personalizing interventions to ensure that they are maximally effective and optimally matched to individual needs. Dr. Haim is considered an expert in technology development and serves on numerous review committees, and external advisory boards. Dr. Haim is a licensed clinical psychologist and earned his doctoral degree in clinical psychology from State University of New York at Albany and completed his research fellowship at the NIMH Intramural Program in the Division of Clinical Neuroendocrinology.

Dr. Dave Clark is chief of the Implementation Science Branch Center for Translation Research & Implementation Science at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. He maintains a portfolio of grants focusing on rigorous testing of complementary and integrative health approaches and dissemination and implementation strategies for efficacious interventions. This includes pain management, treatment of military and veteran populations, health services research, economics, Electronic Health Record meaningful use, and SBIRT (Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment). Prior to joining NHLBI, Dr. Clark had an extensive work history in oral health research, with 8 years as a program officer at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, and in the substance abuse field, including 4 years of research at the University of Kentucky Center on Drug and Alcohol Research and more than 13 years of direct patient care at the VA Medical Center San Diego. He received his Dr.P.H. in epidemiology from the University of Kentucky and his M.P.H. in health services administration from San Diego State University.

Dr. Beth Jaworski joined the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at the National Institutes of Health as a Social and Behavioral Sciences Administrator in September 2021. In this role, she supports the OBSSR mission to enhance the impact of health-related behavioral and social sciences research, coordinate and integrate these sciences within the larger NIH research enterprise, and communicate health-related behavioral and social sciences research findings. Dr. Jaworski's research interests are focused on how the social and behavioral sciences can be leveraged to design and implement impactful and engaging digital health interventions. She is especially interested in mixed methods approaches that center health equity and inclusion, take social context into account, and explore innovative ways to deliver and integrate health information, across a range of settings. Prior to joining OBSSR, she served as the mobile user experience (UX) lead at the VA’s National Center for PTSD, Dissemination and Training Division, where she split her time between creating and researching public mental health apps for PTSD and related conditions. Dr. Jaworski earned her Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Dr. Jeon is an Associate Professor of Advanced Quantitative Methods at the UCLA Department of Education. Her research revolves around developing, applying, and estimating latent variable models for studying measurement, response processes, and individual differences. Dr. Jeon also has a keen interest in developing computational methods and software programs. Recent research topics include team science network analysis and joint analysis of behavioral and biological process data.