Katya Alvarez-Molina | PhD
Institution: Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education at Ensenada (CICESE)
Position: Postdoctoral Researcher
Research Interest: music therapy, interactive music systems, neurodevelopmental disorders, immersive learning
Research Summary: An enthusiast of music with 10+ years in music technology. I have experience creating and developing music interactive systems, and studying human perception and cognition using these systems.
Brian Bauer | PhD, MS
Institution: University of Georgia
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: suicide, decision making, nudges, Precision medicine
Research Summary: My research uses behavioral economic theory (i.e., people use predictable, error-prone mental shortcuts due to limited time, knowledge, and computational power) to understand why people make decisions and identify how to influence people towards better decisions. Currently, I am interested in how passively collected digital sensing data can be used to help personalize messaging strategies to increase engagement with suicide prevention skills and resources.
Weidan Cao | PhD
Institution: Washington State University
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: mHealth intervention engagement, mobile health application development and testing, and the effects of mhealth app on chronic disease (e.g., cardiovascular diseases, cancer) management.
Erica Cruvinel | PhD, MPH
Institution: University of Kansas Medical Center
Position: Research Assistant Professor
Research Interest: scalable digital tools, smoking cessation, substance use disorders, and implementation science
Research Summary: Dr. Cruvinel's research focuses on improving the delivery of smoking cessation treatment, with emphasis on mHealth interventions. Dr. Cruvinel has extensive experience working with underserved communities in Brazil to implement Screening, Brief Interventions and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) for tobacco, alcohol and other drug misuse. She is particularly interested in exploring the potential of mHealth interventions to improve health outcomes for underserved populations in the U.S. and in low-to-middle-income countries. Dr. Cruvinel was recently awarded a K01 from NIDA to develop a remote behavioral intervention that can optimize engagement with smoking cessation medication and counseling among hospitalized smokers in the U.S.
Research Summary: Dr. Cruvinel's research focuses on improving the delivery of smoking cessation treatment, with emphasis on mHealth interventions. Dr. Cruvinel has extensive experience working with underserved communities in Brazil to implement Screening, Brief Interventions and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) for tobacco, alcohol and other drug misuse. She is particularly interested in exploring the potential of mHealth interventions to improve health outcomes for underserved populations in the U.S. and in low-to-middle-income countries. Dr. Cruvinel was recently awarded a K01 from NIDA to develop a remote behavioral intervention that can optimize engagement with smoking cessation medication and counseling among hospitalized smokers in the U.S.
Laura Ellington | MD, MS
Institution: University of Washington
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: pediatric respiratory disorders, implementation science, global health, capacity building
Research Summary: Dr. Ellington's research is aimed at improving health outcomes of pediatric respiratory conditions in resource-constrained settings using scalable, low-resource strategies. She is specifically interested in leveraging mHealth to improve provider knowledge and implementation of evidence-based management guidelines of respiratory illnesses in young children in Ugandan primary care health facilities.
Johanna Folk | PhD
Institution: University of California, San Francisco
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: digital behavioral health interventions, system-impacted youth and families, health equity
Research Summary: My research focuses on improving behavioral health and legal outcomes for system-impacted youth and families. My work examines how to leverage technology and family support to improve access to and quality of behavioral health treatment tailored to youth and families impacted by the juvenile legal and child welfare systems.
Yongyi Guo | PhD
Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: statistical reinforcement learning for digital health interventions, statistical machine learning
Research Summary: Dr. Guo's research interests include statistical machine learning and data-driven decision-making, and more recently focus on statistical reinforcement learning with applications to digital health interventions. Specifically, she is interested in efficient and interpretable algorithms in personalized decision-making as well as privacy issues when implementing reinforcement learning algorithms as part of digital interventions.
John Hollier | MD, MS, MPH
Institution: Baylor College of Medicine
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: functional abdominal pain disorders, user-centered design, health services research, clinical research, mHealth
Research Summary: Dr. Hollier is a board-certified pediatric gastroenterologist, clinical research investigator, and health services researcher. His research agenda includes developing, testing, and implementing mHealth interventions to improve access to optimal psychological therapies for children affected by functional abdominal pain disorders like irritable bowel syndrome. Leveraging a user-centered design approach and behavioral economics, his team has developed a mobile application (App) that remotely delivers prerecorded therapy sessions to patients and will assess its efficacy in a clinical trial. This trial will evaluate whether this App intervention can improve abdominal pain symptoms and reduce maladaptive thoughts. Dr. Hollier's career goal is to become a mHealth technology leader who will improve pediatric health by implementing novel interventions and health delivery strategies.
Adam Horwitz | PhD
Institution: University of Michigan Medical School
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: suicide prevention; adaptive interventions; digital mental health; intensive longitudinal data
Research Summary: My research has largely focused on understanding risk and protective factors for suicide among populations at elevated risk (e.g., adolescents, veterans, LGBTQ+) for suicidal ideation and behaviors. I am funded by a K23 from NIMH to develop a low-burden adaptive intervention to prevent the negative progression of depressive symptoms among first year college students. I am also interested in understanding implementation barriers for mHealth interventions and identifying strategies to increase engagement with users.
Jaime Hughes | PhD, MPH, MSW
Institution: Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: accelerometry for the assessment of sleep-activity patterns, ecological momentary assessments and interventions for geriatric health promotion, implementation science for adoption and sustainment of mHealth programs
Research Interest: accelerometry for the assessment of sleep-activity patterns, ecological momentary assessments and interventions for geriatric health promotion, implementation science for adoption and sustainment of mHealth programs
Research Summary: My work rests as the intersection of intervention science and implementation science, focusing on the design and dissemination of effective, scalable health promotion programs to promote healthy aging. As a sleep researcher, I utilize research-grade and consumer-facing wrist actigraphy to assess 24-hr sleep-activity behaviors. I currently lead an interdisciplinary team in the refinement and scale of a smartphone-based patient integrated assessment, PATINA, to monitor older adults' health behaviors in the home, including the social and physical environments in which such behaviors take place. As an implementation scientist, I also support clinical teams in steps to scale and spread effective mHealth programs into diverse clinical settings and health systems.
Ravi Karkar | PhD
Institution: University of Massachusetts Amherst
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: personal informatics, digitial health tools, ubicomp, HCI
Research Summary: My research focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating tools that can enable people to gather data and interpret personal aspects of their medical condition in the context of their day-to-day lives. Specifically, I focus on opportunities for individualized interventions that can be more effective and appropriate than one-size-fits-all population based interventions. My long-term goal is to empower people to gain an informed perspective of their individual health and well-being. I am interested in exploring how to improve translation of the research we do out of labs/clinics and into practice.
Traci M. Kennedy | PhD
Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: ADHD, alcohol, mHealth, JITAI
Research Summary: Broadly, Dr. Kennedy's research centers on attenuating and preventing negative outcomes of ADHD in young people with a particular focus on reducing risk for problematic alcohol use. She is especially interested in understanding momentary processes that underlie these negative outcomes and how to disrupt these processes in the moment using mHealth and just-in-time adaptive interventions. Supported by a Career Development Award, Dr. Kennedy is currently developing an mHealth intervention for transitional-aged youth/emerging adults with ADHD to enhance inhibitory control and reduce real-world problematic alcohol use.
Jin Sol Lee | MD, MPH
Institution: Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California
Position: Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine
Research Interest: design research, quality improvement, mobile health integrations
Research Interest: design research, quality improvement, mobile health integrations
Research Summary: Design research to optimize transitions of care as patients are discharged from the hospital to home. My prior work has focused on leveraging gamification, social connectivity, and human centered co-design to develop mobile health application designs to support personalized cardiac recovery for heart attack survivors. Additionally, worked on creating human centered alarms for a large diabetes client for their digital health platform. My long-term interests include the development of a chatbot integrating DBCI and JITAI strategies to extend care delivery after discharge for patients at high risk for readmissions due to care gaps that can potentially be avoided using digital health platforms.
Aaron P. Lesher | MD, MSCR
Institution: Medical University of South Carolina
Position: Associate Professor in Surgery and Pediatrics
Research Interests: telehealth in vulnerable populations, burn injuries among pediatric patients, neonatology
Research Summary: His research program focuses on using telehealth to improve the access to high quality care in vulnerable populations. His main research efforts are focused on pediatric patients who are being treated for burn injury. He and his team developed a novel smartphone application called 'TOBI', which improves at-home burn care delivery for patients and their families.
Research Summary: His research program focuses on using telehealth to improve the access to high quality care in vulnerable populations. His main research efforts are focused on pediatric patients who are being treated for burn injury. He and his team developed a novel smartphone application called 'TOBI', which improves at-home burn care delivery for patients and their families.
Zhengxiong Li | PhD
Institution: The University of Colorado Denver
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: Internet-of-Things (IoT)/mobile, mobile health, cybersecurity
Research Summary: My research domain lies in the Internet of things (IoT)/Mobile, especially in exploring, designing, implementing, and evaluating novel intelligent sensing and computing systems for high-impact real-world applications in health and security.
Research Summary: My research domain lies in the Internet of things (IoT)/Mobile, especially in exploring, designing, implementing, and evaluating novel intelligent sensing and computing systems for high-impact real-world applications in health and security.
Shan Lin | PhD
Institution: Stony Brook University
Position: Associate Professor
Research Interest: cyber physical systems, wireless networks, networked information systems, sensing systems
Research Summary: Dr. Lin's research is in the area of networked systems, with an emphasis on feedback control based design for cyber physical systems and sensor systems. Shan Lin works on wireless network protocols, interoperable medical devices, smart transportation systems, and intelligent sensing systems.
Research Summary: Dr. Lin's research is in the area of networked systems, with an emphasis on feedback control based design for cyber physical systems and sensor systems. Shan Lin works on wireless network protocols, interoperable medical devices, smart transportation systems, and intelligent sensing systems.
Chiung-ju (CJ) Liu | PhD
Institution: University of Florida
Position: Associate Professor
Research Interest: late-life disability prevention, late-life exercise, community-based or home-based intervention to support aging in place
Research Interest: late-life disability prevention, late-life exercise, community-based or home-based intervention to support aging in place
Research Summary: Dr. Liu's research area is healthy aging. She is interested in identifying factors to increase older adults' functional ability, which is the ability to do, take care of oneself and others, and enjoy life. Her recent research interest is to integrate mHealth technology with rehabilitation services to support patient functional recovery. Her research goal is to increase disability-free life expectancy for older adults by developing, testing, and implementing evidence-based programs.
Rachel Ludeke | PhD, MSW
Institution: Thomas Jefferson University
Position: Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Research Interest: educational and employment disparities among child welfare involved minority youth, egocentric social network analysis
Research Summary: Dr. Ludeke's research examines the educational and employment disparities of child welfare involved minority youth using egocentric social network analysis and mixed methods.
Jacqueline Louise Mair | PhD
Institution: Singapore-ETH Centre & National University of Singapore
Position: Senior Scientist
Research Interest: mHealth, lifestyle behaviors, wearable technology, JITAIs, behavior change
Research Summary: My research explores ways to improve lifestyle behaviours, such as physical activity, sedentary behaviour, diet, and sleep, in different populations and settings with a particular focus on mHealth behaviour change interventions and their impact on health and wellbeing outcomes.
Laura Reid Marks | PhD
Institution: Florida State University
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: minority stressors and their effects on racial minorities, alcohol-related health disparities in black emerging adults, mHealth interventions
Research Summary: Dr. Marks' program of research has focused on minority stressors and their effects on the lives of adults from racial minority groups. Her goal is to reduce alcohol-related health disparities in Black emerging adults by developing culturally tailored mobile health (mHealth) interventions. She has a recently funded Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award (K23) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). For her research project, she will examine the feasibility and acceptability of translating and integrating strategies drawn from behavioral economics in a mHealth intervention to support proximal engagement in mindfulness and distal reduction in alcohol consumption in Black college male drinkers on a predominantly White campus
Olga Perski | PhD
Institution: University of California, San Diego & Tampere University
Position: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Research Interest: user engagement, user-centred design, smoking cessation, ecological momentary assessment, Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions
Research Summary: I'm an interdisciplinary researcher and practitioner health psychologist working at the intersection of behavioural science and technology. My research is focused on the development, optimisation and evaluation of interventions for smoking cessation and alcohol reduction delivered via smartphone apps, chatbots and virtual reality. I'm interested in the technology-enabled, real-time assessment and modelling of within-person processes and associated just-in-time adaptive interventions. I'm an advocate of Open Science practices and I act as Co-Director for the Open Digital Health initiative, which aims to enable the scaling and sharing of evidence-informed digital health tools.
Phyllis Raynor | PhD
Institution: University of South Carolina
Position: Assistant Researh Professor in the Penn Center for Mental Health
Research Interest: digital interventions that support recovery from substance use, human-centered design; community-based participatory research (CBPR) , digital self-management interventions; substance abuse / mental health
Research Summary: My primary research is focused on leveraging digital self-management interventions to support self-care, parenting, and long-term recovery from substance use disorders (SUD). I am committed to an academic research career focused on SUD disparities research. More specifically, my current research uses a CBPR approach to tailor and test a customized digital intervention that provides recovery and parenting supports to pregnant and postpartum women in early recovery from SUD. My commitment to SUD research stems from clinical expertise, research experiences, and concern for the recent escalating maternal mortality rates associated with SUD. My ultimate goal is to become an independent investigator in the novel integration of digital technology to provide meaningful supports to families affected by SUD.
Leigh Ridings | PhD
Institution: Medical University of South Carolina
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: Dr. Leigh Ridings is a licensed clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). She is the Associate Director for Child and Family Services for the Trauma Resilience and Recovery Program at MUSC. Her research focuses on development and evaluation of scalable, sustainable health interventions to address the mental health, well-being, and recovery needs of children and families affected by traumatic events. She is particularly interested in using technology (mHealth apps, text- and chatbot-based resources, and telehealth) to enhance access to evidence-based mental health services for children and caregivers after traumatic events (e.g., pediatric traumatic injury).
Walter Roberts | PhD
Institution: Yale School of Medicine
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: treatments for alcohol use disorder and other addictive diseases, mHealth technologies, just-in-time remote interventions, methodological tools for treatment development research
Research Summary: My research focuses on developing novel treatments for alcohol use disorder and other addictive diseases, with specific interest in using mobile health technologies to both enhance existing treatments (e.g., just-in-time remote interventions) and develop methodological tools for treatment development research.
Megan Salwei | PhD
Institution: Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Position: Research Assistant Professor
Research Interest: human factors engineering methods and principals, health information technology (HIT), patient safety and care quality
Research Summary: My research program applies human factors engineering methods and principles to improve the design of health information technology (HIT) to enhance patient safety and care quality. I am primarily interested in the design of HIT to support decision-making and teamwork in healthcare, not just between clinicians but between the entire healthcare team – clinicians, patients, and their family caregivers. I am also interested in how to successfully integrate advanced technologies, such as those based on machine learning, into care processes.
Frank Schwebel | PhD
Institution: University of New Mexico
Position: Research Assistant Professor
Research Interest: mHealth interventions for substance use disorders (SUDs), MRTs, just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs)
Research Summary: My research is committed to developing, implementing, and evaluating the effectiveness of mHealth interventions for substance use disorders (SUDs). My training emphasized developing quantitative skills to analyze mHealth data (eg., intensive longitudinal data, "big data") and increasing my knowledge and experience with advanced mHealth methodologies (eg., microrandomized trials (MRTs)). Quantitatively, I learned how to apply machine learning algorithms (eg., elastic net regression, classification and regression trees, random forest models) to answer addictions-related questions. Another major emphasis of mine has been to gain exposure to advanced mHealth methodologies such as MRTs and just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs)
Research Summary: My research is committed to developing, implementing, and evaluating the effectiveness of mHealth interventions for substance use disorders (SUDs). My training emphasized developing quantitative skills to analyze mHealth data (eg., intensive longitudinal data, "big data") and increasing my knowledge and experience with advanced mHealth methodologies (eg., microrandomized trials (MRTs)). Quantitatively, I learned how to apply machine learning algorithms (eg., elastic net regression, classification and regression trees, random forest models) to answer addictions-related questions. Another major emphasis of mine has been to gain exposure to advanced mHealth methodologies such as MRTs and just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs)
Oshani Seneviratne | PhD
Institution: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Position: Assistant Professor
Research Interest: personalizing health through mobile, blockchain, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence technologies, health informatics, and decentralized systems
Research Summary: I have been an active researcher in health informatics and decentralized systems research for over five years. At Rensselaer, I led the research activities of the IBM-funded Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning, and Semantics (HEALS) project for the last five years. Through this research collaboration, I have co-designed and developed ontologies for breast cancer characterization, guideline provenance, study cohort modeling, user-centric AI explanations, personal health, and the combination of blockchain and the internet of things. I have recently focused on building mHealth applications using the MIT App Inventor framework.
Md Mobashir Hasan Shandhi | PhD
Institution: Duke University
Position: Postdoctoral Research Associate
Research Interest: development of wearable sensors, signal processing, and machine learning algorithms for healthcare applications.
Research Summary: Dr. Shandhi's research focuses on developing wearable sensors and corresponding signal processing and machine learning algorithms to monitor patients with chronic and infectious diseases outside clinical settings. He is a recent recipient of the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship on wearable biosensors to monitor cardiorespiratory fitness in patients with heart failure. He developed an intelligent allocation method for COVID-19 diagnostic testing at Duke using commercial wearables. His previous works involve developing wearables for cardiovascular and neurological health monitoring for patients with heart failure and stress-related disorders during his PhD at Georgia Tech. His research has been recognized with media coverage and multiple research and achievement awards.
Monica Elizabeth Tentori Espinosa | PhD
Institution: Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada, CICESE
Position: Professor in Computer Science
Research Interest: ubiquitous computing involve challenges related to AI, sensing and ML, and IHC
Research Summary: Her work has focused primarily on supporting challenges associated to health and urban environments. Her research intersects in ubiquitous computing and HCI. She is the first Latin American woman and the only Mexican who have received the international award "Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship". She is the first woman from Ensenada who received the award of distinguished citizen of the city of Ensenada for her work in technological innovation. She is member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) as level II. She is member of the steering committe of ubiquitous computing for both the ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGMOBILE chapter, and member of the UC Mexus advisory subcommittee.
Min-Jeong Yang | PhD
Institution: Moffitt Cancer Center
Position: Applied Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Interest: smoking cessation, mindfulness, exposure therapy, cancer survivorship, mHealth, ecological momentary assessment and intervention
Research Summary: Dr. Yang's research focuses on (1) developing and evaluating behavioral interventions and conducting assessments in real-time through mobile devices to improve cancer risk behaviors (e.g., smoking), (2) understanding how mindfulness and the principles of cognitive behavior therapy drive key mechanisms of change in cancer risk behaviors (e.g., craving for smoking), and (3) understanding the needs of marginalized communities with a focus on sexual and gender minorities for the cultural adaptation of mHealth interventions using mixed methods. Her research aims to promote change in health behavior through emerging methodologies.