Principal Investigator
Matteo Malgaroli is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, affiliated with the Computational Psychiatry program and the NYU Center for Data Science. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. A clinical psychologist with AI expertise, he works to improve the scale, quality, and objectivity of mental health interventions using algorithmic solutions, particularly language models. He also studies digital health applications to evaluate real-world deployment, enable large-scale patient data collection, and expand access to care. He teaches computational methods to psychiatry trainees and psychology students.

Postdoctoral Researcher
Nikita Soni is a postdoctoral fellow in the digimind lab. She has 16 peer-reviewed publications spanning ACL, npj digital medicine, JPSP, WASSA, and CLPsych. She also led the workshop Human-Centered Large Language Modeling (co-founded with the 1st edition at ACL 2024), and she’s leading a SemEval-2026 shared task on Predicting Variation in Emotional Affect (at ACL/EMNLP 2026). Her research focuses on integrating the author’s context into language modeling to build human-context-aware models that can be useful in multiple domains, such as mental health.

Clinical Assistant Professor
Laura Bragdon is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Binghamton University (SUNY) and completed her pre-doctoral internship at the VA Boston Healthcare System. Dr. Bragdon completed a research postdoctoral fellowship at NYU Grossman School of Medicine focused on the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying OCD and related disorders. Her clinical and research interests include clarifying mechanisms of empirically-supported treatments and expanding access to effective therapies for anxiety disorders, OCD, and related conditions.

Postdoctoral Researcher
Julia received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from York University in Toronto, Canada. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Anxiety, Stress, and Prolonged Grief Program at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Her research interests include anxiety, health-related decisions, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Research Data Associate
Zoë Mermin is a Research Data Associate at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, affiliated with the digimind lab and the Anxiety, Stress & Prolonged Grief Program, where she coordinates studies related to treatments for anxiety disorders and the detection of anxiety and depression. In her free time, she enjoys teaching cycling, baking, and hiking.

Graduate Student
Xinran Gao is a master’s student in Psychology at New York University, working with Dr. Matteo Malgaroli on her master’s thesis. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Economics from McGill University, where she studied the use of cursor-tracking methods to improve self-report measures. With interests in clinical psychology and computational approaches, she is currently examining how language models can be used to evaluate linguistic markers of mental health functioning. She is broadly interested in integrating psychological science and emerging technologies to support clinical assessment and care.

Graduate Student
Emily Whitney is a Software Engineer and post-baccalaureate psychology student at Hunter College. She volunteers with Crisis Text Line and is interested in scalable mental health interventions and ways computation can aid the therapeutic process. Prior to her software career, she graduated from Johns Hopkins University with degrees in Economics and Writing Seminars. In her free time she enjoys reading, writing, and traveling to new places.

Graduate Student
Adam Chang is a graduate student in Urban Data Science at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, specializing in machine learning methods in healthcare settings. He holds a Bachelors degree in Applied Psychology also from NYU and has worked in both clinical and computational capacities within the fields of Psychology and Psychiatry. He holds a specific interest in Machine Learning Applications within clinical and public health settings, with current research investigating how geospatial and location-aware digital therapeutics can enhance patient outcomes and clinical workflows.

Mascot
Smokey Zampottino is the lab’s official mascot. Before joining the team, he graduated from the ACC Manhattan Shelter. His research interests include emotion dysregulation during work hours and dog treat extinction paradigms.