Our Collaborators

Our Research Partners

Rachel Brian serves as the Research Project Director for the mHealth for Mental Health Program. She oversees 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 research infrastructure for studies conducted at the mHealth for Mental Health Program. 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.

Ben Buck, Ph.D., is the Clinical Training Lead in the Behavioral Research in Technology and Engineering (BRiTE) Center, as well as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. His research is focused on developing mHealth assessments and interventions for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and cross-diagnostic persecutory ideation. His work has a particular focus on developing mHealth interventions that can be delivered remotely to individuals at risk of psychosis and their family caregivers to promote treatment seeking and reduce duration of untreated illness. His work is supported by a 2019 NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and a K23 Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award (K23MH122504) from NIMH.

 

In addition to his program of research, Dr. Buck is committed to clinical supervision and training. He is currently leading one of the first clinical training sequences for community mental health clinicians learning to serve as mHealth support specialists for clients with serious mental illness. He has been previously recognized as a clinical trainer, as he was the first-ever student winner of UNC’s David Galinsky Award, an honor recognizing excellence in clinical supervision that had previously only ever been won by faculty. He is active in providing supervision in cognitive behavior therapy to third-year psychiatry residents at UW.

 

Prior to his faculty position at UW, Dr. Buck completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Health Services Research and Development at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, where he also completed his clinical psychology internship. While a predoctoral intern, 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 providing care to individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, with experience in inpatient state hospital, VA psychosocial rehabilitation, intensive outpatient and dual-diagnosis settings, as well as in coordinated specialty care for young adults with early psychosis.

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 works as the Research Coordinator on the mHealth for First Episode Psychosis program and two of the Behavioral Sensing projects: Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVH) and Persecutory Ideation (ADAPT). She manages the day-to-day operations of these projects, leads online and community recruitment, facilitates patient engagement, and helps resolve technical and retention issues as we work to build and test technologies for severe mental illness. 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 the BRiTE Center, 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, severe mental illness through this experience. Her research interests include exploring best practices for mental health treatment, and working to reduce stigma.

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. 

 

Jordan Graff, MPH is the Clinical Assessor for the mHealth for Mental Health Program. Jordan conducts clinical assessments for the mHealth implementation project that brings evidence based mobile health intervention, FOCUS, into community mental health centers across Washington. 

 

Prior to his work at the University of Washington, Jordan was a qualitative researcher at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health. He has extensive experience with qualitative data analysis and working with diverse populations. He contributed to a variety of projects regarding health behavior, implementation analysis, and state level evaluation research.

 

Jordan received his Master of Public Health from the University of Iowa with a departmental focus on Community and Behavioral Health.

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 and Center Coordinator for the UW BRiTE Center. 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.

Justin Tauscher, Ph.D., M.S., is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Behavioral Research in Technology and Engineering (BRiTE) Center in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the development and implementation of technology-based treatments to enhance behavioral healthcare and the the training of community-based providers wishing to incorporate them into their practice. As part of his role with the BRiTE Center, Justin also serves as a Mobile Mental Health Support Specialist for the mHealth for Mental Health Program helping to implement an innovative mHealth intervention in community mental health centers across the state of Washington. 

 

Prior to his position at UW, Justin completed his doctoral program in counseling and counselor education along with a master’s degree in biomedical informatics and a graduate certificate in implementation science at the University of Florida. At the University of Florida, his research focused on the development and implementation of mHealth interventions to improve pediatric health outcomes, the application of machine learning and natural language processing to addiction health services, and the use of discrete choice experiments to improve implementation of telehealth for addiction treatment. As a result of this work, Justin was awarded an Addiction Health Services Research early career investigator award sponsored by the National Institute of Drug Abuse in 2019. Previous to his doctoral study, he served as a research associate at the Dartmouth Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) working on the development and implementation of technology-based interventions to augment addiction, mental health, and supported employment services. Clinically, he has an extensive background as a supervisor and dually licensed mental health and addiction counselor conducting treatment with adolescents, adults, and families. Justin has also served as an adjunct faculty member teaching graduate courses about addiction issues and co-occurring treatment and provides consultation to state and community agencies in areas of program development, addiction treatment, and school-based interventions for addiction.