Bob Drake, MD, PhD

Steven Marcus, PhD

Suzanne Meller, MPH, MSW, LSWAIC

Trevor Cohen, PhD

Lola Kola, PhD

Greg Reger, PhD

Our Collaborators

Our Research Partners

Dror Ben-Zeev, PhD, is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington and licensed Clinical Psychologist who specializes in development and evaluation of technology-based approaches in the study, assessment, treatment, and prevention of mental illness. Dr. Ben-Zeev serves as the Director of the mHealth for Mental Health Program and Co-Director of UW's Behavioral Research in Technology and Engineering (BRiTE) Center. His work includes development and testing of illness self-management apps for people with schizophrenia, leveraging mobile and context-aware technologies for assessment of violence and suicidality in psychiatric hospital settings, behavioral sensing and modelling systems for detection of psychotic relapses, social media-based outreach to people who experience auditory hallucinations, and clinical texting interventions for individuals with serious mental illness in community settings.

Dr. Ben-Zeev’s research has been supported by grants and awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), SYNERGY Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Myrtlewood Foundation, and John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.  He publishes extensively in scientific journals and is a regular speaker at national and international scientific meetings including invited presentations at the White House and National Institute of Mental Health Director’s Innovation Speaker series. Dr. Ben-Zeev has written editorials and commentaries on the use of technology-based interventions for Psychiatric Services, the BMJ, and the New York Times, and his research has been covered by National Public Radio, Nature, Wired Magazine, Slate, and The Economist. He served on the Editorial Board of Schizophrenia Bulletin and is the Inaugural Editor of the "Technology in Mental Health" Column for Psychiatric Services.​

Rachel Brian serves as the Research Project Director for the mHealth for Mental Health Program. She oversees all research initiatives for to ensure compliance and quality of deliverables.

Rachel informs study design, grant preparation, assessment development, database management, analysis, and reporting of findings through academic and non-academic publications. She directs the development and quality assurance testing of technologies used by the mh4mh program. She also leads and oversees qualitative efforts including conducting focus groups, user testing, guide and codebook development, and analysis. 

Rachel develops the research infrastructure for studies conducted at the mHealth for Mental Health Program throughout the world. She manages and trains research staff (locally and remotely), develops recruitment and reporting systems, oversees study logistics including recruitment and technological troubleshooting, ensures the protection of human subjects, and is responsible for institution and funder documentation and reporting.  

Prior to her work at the University of Washington, Rachel developed health behavior change programs, supported research grants and conducted program evaluation at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Michigan State Police Department, Johnson & Johnson, as well as non-profit institutions. Her research interests include exploring ways to use technology to reduce health disparities among marginalized populations including low-income communities, racial, sexual and gender minorities, and those with severe mental illness.

Benjamin Buck, Ph.D., is an Advanced Fellow in VA Health Services Research and Development and a Senior Fellow in the Department of Health Services at the University of Washington School of Public Health. His research is focused on leveraging technologies to develop assessments and interventions based on stress-vulnerability models of psychosis, with a particular focus on paranoia and persecutory ideation.

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Dr. Buck is leading the on-site activities of the VA HSR&D-funded pilot study of the FOCUS mobile intervention at the Psychosocial Rehabilitation and Recovery Center (PRRC) at VA Puget Sound, one of the first ever mHealth trials involving individuals with schizophrenia in the VA. He is also involved in development of new digital interventions designed to engage young people with first-episode psychosis (FEP) and their families.

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Prior to his fellowship at VA HSR&D and UW, Dr. Buck completed his clinical psychology internship at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, where he was awarded the APA Division 18 Outstanding VA Trainee Award. Prior to internship, he completed his undergraduate and doctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Throughout his training, he has been dedicated to services for individual with serious mental illness, with experience in an inpatient state hospital, VA psychosocial rehabilitation, intensive outpatient and dual-diagnosis clinics, and in coordinated specialty care for young people with FEP.

Andrew Campbell, PhD serves as a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, and co directs the DartNets Lab. His research focuses on the development of computational methods for smartphones and wearables with the goal of understanding human behavior. He is particularly interested in the application of mobile sensing to mental health. 

Dr. Campbell's team specializes in building custom sensing smartphone applications for the mh4mh program to infer human behavior and analyze behavioral patterns in order to potentially prevent relapse among recently discharged high-risk patients, predict violent idealization among inpatients, and better understand auditory hallucinations among those who may not normally seek treatment services.

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Dr. Campbell works closely with industry and was on leave from Dartmouth (2016-2017) at Verily Life Sciences and Google working on depression sensing.

Ayesha oversees the day-to-day operations of the Hearing Voices research study and will be expanding operations to coordinate the Persecutory Ideation supplement award. She leads online and community recruitment, facilitates patient engagement, and helps resolve technical and other issues. She develops study protocols, maintains research databases, and creates government reports. Ayesha also conducts quality assurance testing, manages device inventory and billing. 

Prior to working at mHealth for Mental Health, Ayesha completed her Master of Research in Clinical Psychology focusing her research on resilience among individuals along the psychotic spectrum. Ayesha has worked in multiple community mental health centers in various capacities and developed a greater understanding of, and interest in, serious mental illness through this experience. Her research interests include exploring best practices for mental health treatment, and working to reduce stigma among under-served and marginalized populations.

Dr. Trevor Cohen is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He received his PhD in biomedical informatics from Columbia University in New York, after training and practicing as a physician in South Africa. Motivated by his clinical interests, his doctoral work concerned the application of methods of automated text analysis to facilitate comprehension of clinical narratives in the domain of psychiatry. Dr. Cohen has developed a NIH-funded research program concerned with leveraging knowledge extracted from the biomedical literature for information retrieval and pharmacovigilance, and contributed toward large-scale national projects such as the Office of the National Coordinator’s SHARP-C initiative, which supported a range of research projects that aimed at improving the usability and comprehensibility of electronic health record interfaces.

Dr. Cohen’s research focuses on the development and application of methods of distributional semantics – methods that learn to represent the meaning of terms and concepts from the ways in which they are distributed in large volumes of electronic text. He and his collaborators have applied the resulting distributed representations (concept or word embeddings) to a broad range of biomedical problems, including: (1) using literature-derived models to find plausible drug/side-effect relationships; (2) finding new therapeutic applications for known drugs (drug repurposing); (3) modeling the exchanges between users of health-related online social media platforms; and (4) characterizing aspects of psychiatric narrative that are pertinent to particular diagnostic constructs, such as psychosis.

Robert Drake, M.D, Ph.D., is the Andrew Thomson Professor of Health Policy and Clinical Practice at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and Vice President at the Westat Corporation.  

His work on psychiatric rehabilitation over four decades, including integrated treatments for people with dual disorders, evidence-based mental health practices, and implementing vocational services, has helped to shift mental health services toward greater resonance with clients’ goals.  He has championed electronic mental health technologies at Dartmouth and Westat.  His 600+ publications include several articles on technology tools for people with mental illness. 

Dr. Hudenko has significant experience in the fields of both mental health and technology. Dr. Hudenko is a licensed clinical psychologist who conducts research, works with patients, and teaches classes.  He holds a joint appointment as a faculty member at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.  Dr. Hudenko is also an experienced web designer. Dr. Hudenko has served as a web design and database administrator to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for over 5 years, and has designed and implemented websites for numerous other organizations.

Dr. Hudenko is also the CEO of Incente, LLC.  Incente is the creator of Proxi, a platform designed to improve the delivery of mental healthcare. The product provides HIPAA-compliant technology for mental health professionals, patients, and their support networks.  

Dr. Hudenko received his BA from the University of Michigan and his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Vanderbilt. Prior to his work at Dartmouth Dr. Hudenko was an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Ithaca College and Cornell University.

Lola Kola, PhD is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lead City University, Ibadan. Lola is a Medical Sociologist with a background in social work and has clinical experience working with people with mental illness.

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Dr. Kola has served as Co-Investigator on research projects leveraging mHealth in Africa to improve care for perinatal women and adults with depression. She has managed projects on the use of mobile phones for clinician support and supervision, encouraging treatment compliance in perinatal adolescents and women. Her work has also focused on designing an mHealth adaptation of the WHO Mental Health GAP Intervention Guide for use by front-line primary care workers in Nepal and Nigeria. Lola has worked as a National Consultant for Mental Health with the World Health Organisation Office in Abuja, Nigeria. Having participated in research throughout nine Sub-Saharan African countries, Dr. Kola has extensive familiarity with the opportunities and challenges experienced by low and middle-income countries.  

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Dr. Kola was named an NIH Emerging Global Leader by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and has been awarded funding for 5 years to further her mentorship training with Dr. Dror Ben-Zeev at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her NIH funded research involves user centered design in the development of mhealth interventions to complement primary care for Adolescent Perinatal Depression in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Dr. Marcus is a faculty member in the Center for Mental Health Policy and Services Research (CMHPSR) at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an epidemiologist, mental health services researcher, and statistician who is currently serving as the methodologist on a number of NIMH implementation-focused RCTs examining practice facilitation and mental health service engagement.

Dr. Marcus is also a director of the Research Methods Core of a T32 fellowship program focusing on implementing effective interventions at Community Mental Health Centers. He has extensive expertise in designing, implementing, and analyzing results of field research studies and is an expert in the analysis of large claims databases (pharmacy claims, Medicaid, private insurance), hospital discharge datasets, public use survey data, and smaller proprietary research databases to answer important national policy questions related to health quality of care and service use. His research has led to hundreds of scholarly publications in leading academic journals.

Suzanne Meller, MPH, MSW, LSWAIC is the Mobile Mental Health Support Specialist for the mHealth for Mental Health Program. Suzanne assists with clinical operations for an implementation project which brings an evidence-based mobile health intervention, FOCUS, into community mental health centers across the State of Washington. Suzanne also assists with day-to-day research study coordination including piloting a mobile texting intervention for people with serious mental illness in a community mental health center.

Prior to her work at the University of Washington, Suzanne was a therapist and case manager at a community mental health center in South King County, Washington working with people with serious mental illness. Suzanne has contributed to behavioral health research studies at the University of Michigan, University of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the University of Georgia. Suzanne is interested in bridging the research to practice gap in behavioral healthcare and behavioral health equity.

Suzanne received her Master of Social Work and Master of Public Health degrees from the University of Michigan. Suzanne holds an Associate Independent Clinical Social Work License in the State of Washington.

Dr. Greg Reger is the Deputy Associate Chief of Staff for Mental Health at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine.  He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Fuller Theological Seminary and completed his psychology internship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  He served with the 98th Combat Stress Control Detachment at Joint Base Lewis-McChord and deployed to Iraq for a year prior to working for the Department of Defense National Center for Telehealth and Technology (T2). Dr. Reger’s research is focused on the design, development, and evaluation of innovative technologies to support Service Member and Veteran psychological health. He has investigated immersive virtual reality for several clinical purposes with an emphasis on virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD. 

Dr. Reger is currently evaluating the effectiveness of a computerized virtual patient to support provider training in motivational interviewing.  Dr. Reger has designed virtual world experiences to support psychoeducation on PTSD.  He also led the DoD/VA team that designed PE Coach, a treatment companion mobile application to support patients and providers working through a gold standard psychotherapy for PTSD.  Dr. Reger’s accomplishments have been recognized by the American Psychological Association who awarded him three National Awards, the Arthur C. Melton Early Achievement Award (Division 19), the Outstanding Contribution to Practice in Trauma Psychology (Division 56), and the Peter J. N. Linnerooth National Service Award (Division 18).