2019-2020 MHTech Seed Funding Awardees

The Center for Mental Health Technology at UC San Diego is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2019-2020 Interdisciplinary Mental Health Technology Seed Grant Proposals. The MHTech Center is a new campus hub for interdisciplinary research on the application of technological solutions to address mental health problems. Through sponsorship by the Office of Research Affairs, the Seed Funding program is designed to support early stage research related to diagnosis, treatment, and/or prevention of mental health problems. The primary goal of this program is to stimulate projects and partnerships between faculty from engineering and mental health departments. Recipients bring diverse ideas, resources, and personnel from across departments of the Schools of Medicine and Engineering to bear on pressing mental health issues in our society.

"Personalizing Mental Health Assessments & Therapeutics for Mood Disorders"

PI: Dr. Jyoti Mishra, Psychiatry, NEATLabs; Sujit Dey, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mobile Systems Design Lab; Dhakshin Ramanathan, Psychiatry, NEATLabs

Project: College-age youth are especially vulnerable to mood disorders during this crucial time of transition to full independence, with one-in-three college students experience some form of diagnosable mental disorder. Based on emerging advances in clinical and translational neuroscience integrated with machine learning engineering, we propose a two-stage personalized mental health project in college-age youth with mood disorders. Stage 1 will utilize scalable assays of brain function and cognition along with quantified assessments of daily life behaviors of sleep, physical activity and stress to develop precision diagnosis algorithms using N-of-1 personalized modeling of mood disorders. Stage 2 will use these models to deliver multimodal interventions personalized to the neurobiology and lifestyle of the patient.