Road to Recovery Study
A.J. Pandina graduated from Tufts University in 2022 with a degree in Biopsychology along the pre-medical track. At Tufts, he worked to assess the influence of caffeine on problem-solving and taught English at the local center for adult Spanish-speaking refugees. Now, as a Clinical Research Assistant in both the Neurobiology of Fear Lab and Baker Functional Imaging Lab, he focuses on studies related to anhedonia, facial feature extraction, and language processing.
Brien received his Bachelor’s of Science with honors in psychology from Davidson College in 2022. At Davidson, Brien studied positive psychology and self-compassion, culminating in an honors thesis on the effects of a 90-minute single session loving-kindness meditation intervention for undergraduate wellbeing. As an RA in the Baker Lab, Brien works on a longitudinal deep phenotyping study performing clinical interviews of patients with major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and related mental illnesses. Most recently, he has begun work on a personal research project helping to implement a clinical measurements initiative at McLean and assess the clinical utility of wearable devices for monitoring sleep and activity in psychiatric inpatients. Brien intends to pursue a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology succeeding his time at McLean.
Determining when a patient is ready for discharge is an open problem, as currently 20% of those hospitalized for psychiatric illness will be hospitalized again within 30 days. To address this issue, we are working to identify behavioral biomarkers for severe mental illness in 400 inpatients hospitalized for psychosis at McLean. The Multisense project is a collaboration with Dr. with LP Morency‘s team at Carnegie Mellon University, where information is extracted from both audio and video of both clinician and patient during a series of semi-structured inpatient interviews. Multimodal analysis techniques are used both to predict clinical scale and discharge-readiness scores, as well as to visualize a summary of each interview and extract relevant interpretable features.
More
Bryce received his Bachelor’s in psychology from Wesleyan University in 2022 after studying experimental psychopathology using behavioral and electrophysiological methods. Working in two research labs, he helped with data acquisition and analysis for cognitive, judgment and decision-making tasks and auditory oddball tasks using EEG. Now, he is a clinical RA in the Baker Lab working on longitudinal deep phenotyping studies involving functional neuroimaging and clinical interviewing of patients with major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and related mental illnesses. Bryce plans to pursue a PhD in Clinical Psychology following his time at McLean.
Michaela is a year 4 PhD student in the Harvard Program in Neuroscience, and previously received an M.Eng and B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She is investigating machine learning techniques to predict behavior from wrist actigraphy, in particular detecting rituals in OCD. She also works on software development for data cleaning and visualization tools across lab projects.
More