People

Mental health is a major societal challenge. In the US, approximately 1 in 5 adults (46.6 million) experiences mental illness in a given year; 1 in 5 youth aged 13–18 (21.4%) and 13% of children aged 8-15 experiences a severe mental disorder; over 30% of adolescents and 18.1% of adults experience an anxiety disorder. Engineering technologies have the potential to improve diagnosis, intervention, and treatment of mental illness. In the Viterbi School of Engineering, a growing number of faculty are exploring research relevant to mental health.

	Heather Culbertson Wearable haptic devices for emotion regulation through virtual touch
	Gale Lucas Virtual reality and computerized assessments for depression and anxiety; web resources for prevention around depression and anxiety
	Maja Mataric Socially assistive robotics for anxiety and depression coping and companionship and machine learning for personalized anxiety-management wearable devices
	Shri Narayanan Bio-behavioral machine intelligence to support human and autonomous decision making; novel diagnostics, personalized interventions, and tracking treatment in mental and behavioral health
	Maryam Shanechi Neurotechnology development; Closed-loop neuromodulation in depression, anxiety, chronic pain; Direct electrical brain stimulation; Neural decoding of mood; Brain network modeling; System identification for brain networks.
	Mohammad Soleymani Computational mental health assessment from verbal and nonverbal behavior (depression, PTSD, alcohol abuse); conversational virtual agents for therapeutic interviewing.
	Jennifer Treweek Whole-organ molecular phenotyping and circuit-mapping to inform novel treatment modalities for stress-related disorders; non-invasive approaches for modulating depression-associated neural networks.
	Phebe Vayanos Robust and fair suicide prevention interventions for vulnerable populations.