Core CAPES Faculty

Emmanuel Agu, PhD, is the Harold L. Jurist ’61 and Heather E. Jurist Dean’s Professor of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His expertise is in mobile health and artificial intelligence methods for medical image analysis and passive smartphone sensing of user health. Dr. Agu has researched and developed Moodable, a smartphone system that can detect depression and suicide ideation from passively collected smartphone logs combined with voice snippets actively provided by subjects. He also has developed a mobile application for patients with advanced diabetes, which automatically analyzes the healing progress of foot ulcers from smartphone images and helps visiting nurses manage patients’ conditions at home, funded by the NIH/National Science Foundation. This app creates wound image analysis algorithms using machine and deep learning. Agu is also on a DARPA-funded project analyzing smartphone biomarkers for Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and infectious diseases including Covid-19 and influenza. He has worked on a range of other mobile applications, including those for detecting intoxication and impairment by marijuana from a smartphone user’s gait, for obesity problem solving counseling, and for administering exercise as a drug to mitigate alcohol addiction. 

Bruce Barton, PhD, is a professor of biostatistics in the Population and Quantitative Health Sciences Department at UMass Chan Medical School and co-lead of the Design, Data, and Analysis Unit. He has been involved in medical research studies, especially clinical trials, for over 45 years and as been the PI/director of 38 Data Coordinating Centers, funded both by the NIH and by industry. His role in CAPES is, 1) to provide insight and advice in the study design, 2) to provide oversight and direction of data management and curation of data as co-lead (in collaboration with Jung Ae Lee, PhD) of the Design, Data, and Analysis Unit; and (3) to collaborate with other faculty biostatisticians in the design of analysis approaches for the CAPES projects. Dr. Barton's previous studies have included a broad spectrum of studies, including those studying depression and anxiety in addition to working with Ed Boudreaux, PhD, on studies of suicidality. In more general terms, his background in clinical trials includes the design, development, and oversight of trial infrastructure, including data management, randomization/drug inventory management systems, monitoring of data through statistical process control approaches, analysis, and developing the tables, listings, and figures for publications.

Nancy Byatt, DO, MS, MBA, is a perinatal psychiatrist and physician-scientist focused on improving systems of care to promote the mental health of parents and children. Her passion is deeply rooted in her experiences as a clinician, researcher, daughter, and mother. She is a professor with tenure of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, OB-GYN, and Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. Byatt developed the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program (MCPAP) for Moms. MCPAP for Moms is a statewide program that has 1) increased access to mental health care for thousands of perinatal individuals 2) become a national model for perinatal mental health care, and 3) impacted state and national policies and funding. She is the founding executive director of the Lifeline for Families Center and Lifeline for Moms Program at UMass Chan. The Center’s activities include capacity building, consultation, and research. Byatt’s research uses implementation science methods to design, implement and evaluate scalable approaches for improving parental and child mental health services and outcomes.

Karen Clements, MPH, ScD, is the leader of the Economic Evaluation Unit of the Methods Core for CAPES. She is an epidemiologist and health services researcher in the forHealth Consulting division of UMass Chan Medical School. She is an assistant professor with the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan. Dr. Clements is a trained researcher with a doctoral degree in psychiatric epidemiology and currently co-investigator on four NIH-funded studies in suicide prevention, leading the cost-effectiveness analyses of the suicide risk screening and management interventions. In addition to her contribution to these studies, Clements' research has focused on the areas of health services research, cost of care, and cost effectiveness analysis for hepatitis C virus and substance use disorders. She has developed expertise in study design and analysis of medical claims and electronic medical record data using a variety of methodological approaches, including survival analysis, time series analysis, hierarchical regression and decision analysis.

Daniel Coppersmith, PhD, is an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research program aims to advance the understanding, prediction, and prevention of suicide. His research is grounded in the theoretical orientation that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous and he use new technologies, such as smartphones and wearable biosensors, to capture and model these factors. The ultimate goal of his program of research is to improve the lives of individuals with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology from Harvard University and completed clinical training at McLean Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the VA Boston Healthcare System. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, and the American Psychological Foundation. 

Rachel Davis-Martin, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, collaborator on CAPES and co-lead of the CATS-PC Exploratory Project. She has diverse clinical experience in a variety of medical settings, including the emergency department, primary care, and hospital-based specialty clinics. Her current research program focuses on creating innovative, evidence-based strategies for implementing integrated behavioral health into diverse medical settings, with a focus on leveraging technology to improve detection and treatment of substance abuse and suicide risk. Dr. Davis-Martin completed a National Cancer Institute-funded fellowship in implementation science and integrated behavioral health to enable a career evaluating barriers to and methods for improving patient access to behavioral health care, including telehealth delivered interventions and care transitions. She has been a co-investigator on three NIH-funded SBIR/STTR grants that have built, studied, and deployed technologies to improve the assessment and management of a range of behavioral health domains, including suicide. Her combined unique research and clinical experiences have given her insight into the challenges and opportunities associated with targeting mental health in clinical settings.

Katherine Dixon-Gordon, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and co-lead for the Leveraging “Early Mental Health Uncovering©” Risk for Suicide (LEMURS) project within CAPES. She is an associate professor and director of clinical training at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Dixon-Gordon is dedicated to better understanding, predicting, and ultimately reducing self-injurious behaviors. She has (1) content expertise in self-injurious behaviors, (2) proficiency in multi-method paradigms to permit versatility in rigorous tests of CAPES’ tools, and (3) experience conducting randomized clinical trials. She has been an investigator in over 6 federally-funded (National Science Foundation, NIH and Canadian Institutes of Health Research) studies of the assessment and treatment of self-injurious behaviors across outpatient and emergency-department-recruited samples. Dixon-Gordon is passionate about compassionate, evidence-based assessment and care for patients who engage in self-destructive behaviors. Ultimately, she hopes that this work reduces suicide and aids individuals in developing lives worth living.

Soussan Djamasbi, PhD, is a professor of information systems at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), specializing in designing user-centered technologies that support decision making. She employs eye-tracking technology to assess user engagement with various types of visual content, including embedded content on organizational websites and complex information in medical decision aids. Her research extends beyond design evaluation; it also explores the use of eye movement data as a biomarker of experience. She has developed a system that automatically detects cognitive load from eye movements. In a recent project, Dr. Djamasbi is working on designing a clinician support system that utilizes eye movements as a biomarker for health symptoms such as chronic pain and anxiety.

Denise R. Dunlap, PhD, is the lead for the Admin Core Business Development Unit for CAPES, which is dedicated to helping investigators focus on technology transfer and commercialization. She is an associate professor in the Manning School of Business at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). Dr. Dunlap is a specialist in strategic management and international business and focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. Her core research agenda is focused on scholarship engagement involving the intersection between business and science. Her interdisciplinary research expertise led her to create the Biotech East training program, which trains PhD students, graduate students, and postdocs in health, science, and medical programs that want to transition into jobs in biotech, med-tech, and pharmaceuticals. Dunlap is the business unit principal investigator (PI) and co-director of the Training and Dissemination Core for the NIH-sponsored Center for Advancing Point of Care Technologies (CAPCaT). The goal of the program is to train program participants in the issues related to point-of-care (POC) and home-based technologies and to develop and disseminate current knowledge about these technologies to different stakeholders, including patients, families/caregivers, medical professionals, community health leaders, policy makers, and investors. Dunlap is also the business unit co-PI for the NIH-sponsored UML Innovative Fellows Training program (LIFT), an entrepreneurship program for early-career scientists working in biotech and medtech.

Ben Gerber, MD, MPH, co-leads the Methods Core Person-Centered Design Unit of CAPES and collaborates on the Jaspr/ADAPT project. He is an internist, data scientist, researcher, and chief of the Division of Health Informatics and Implementation Science in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. Dr. Gerber's research interests include diabetes self-management and health behavior promotion through technology and health services delivery redesign. He has extensive experience in the design, development, and implementation of mobile health (mHealth) solutions targeting diverse patient populations with limited access to health care services. His research group has involved health coaching weight-management interventions, 2-way text messaging support, multimedia education, mobile app development and implementation, and physiologic measures including wearables for real-time engagement.  

Sharon A. Johnson, PhD, is a professor of operations and industrial engineering in the Business School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Her research has focused on applying industrial engineering methods and models to address issues in health care delivery. Her work has addressed three broad aims within this domain: (1) using quality improvement methods such as Lean and applying work system frameworks to support more effective implementation, (2) improving operational decision-making by developing quantitative models that incorporate dynamics, risk, and uncertainty, and (3) harnessing opportunities created by information technologies to improve workflow and care delivery. Dr. Johnson is a co-investigator on a National Institute of Mental Health-funded project led by Edwin Boudreaux, PhD, focused on deriving a clinical decision rule to support universal risk detection and optimize patient care workflow in adult emergency department patients. Previously, she worked with Dr. Boudreaux on the ED-SAFE 2 study that explores using lean and continuous improvement as an implementation strategy for universal screening for suicide and a safety planning intervention.

Lourah Kelly, PhD, is the project lead for the Dissemination and Community Engagement (DanCE) Unit of CAPES. She is a primarily NIH-funded assistant professor at UMass Chan Medical School in the Departments of Psychiatry & Behavioral Services and Emergency Medicine, and within the Implementation Science and Practice Advances Research Center (iSPARC). Dr. Kelly is lead of a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which involves designing, refining and evaluating a novel, avatar-guided, technology-based intervention for emerging adults with alcohol use problems and suicidal thoughts, delivered within the emergency department. The avatar intervention was designed using feedback from clinical experts, emergency department experts, emerging adults with lived experiences, and with consultation from the iSPARC Young Adult Advisory Board. Kelly is a collaborator n a National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded R24 led by Kristyn Zajac called the Collaborative Hub for Emerging Adult Recovery Research and is involved with community participatory methods with young adults and peer support specialists with lived experience with opioid use disorder. She is also a CAPES Emerging Scholar and meets criteria for being an underrepresented person in biomedical research because of her socio-economic background, so she particularly benefits from the faculty development programs offered through CAPES. 

Catarine Kiefe, PhD, MD, began as a mathematician, earning her doctoral degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She earned her medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco. She specialized in internal medicine, completing her residency at the University of Minnesota Hospitals and Clinics. As the inaugural chair of the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences (PQHS) at UMass Chan Medical School (then known as the University of Massachusetts Medical School) from 2009 to 2019, Dr. Kiefe combined the rigor of mathematics with the needs of clinical medicine. She continues to do so currently as the chief scientific officer of PQHS.  She draws upon the intellectual curiosity and drive for discovery that marked her early career as an abstract researcher, using it to help lead an applied research function with the objective of improving health care outcomes for individuals and populations. As a mathematician, Kiefe is straightforward and concise. As a researcher, she explores data for insight into elements of cause and effect. As a physician-scientist, she “weave[s] service — a link to practice — into discovery.” And as a leader, she has always sought to promote cohesion among her team and colleagues around a collective vision. Kiefe has been funded for 25 years as principal investigator (PI) on projects funded by the NIH, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Veterans Affairs (VA), and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). She has published close to 300 peer-reviewed articles and devote significant time to mentoring the next generation, as the PI on a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute T32 institutional training grant and on UMass Chan’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences-funded KL2 career development program for junior faculty. She has served on multiple NIH study sections and advisory groups and is co-editor-in-chief of Medical Care, one of the premier scientific journals in health services research.

Note that Kiefe has stepped down as director, and will remain active in CAPES. She will continue overseeing the Methods Core while transitioning oversight to Tony Nunes, PhD, MS and Emmanuel Agu, PhD. The Center owes a great debt to Kiefe, and her legacy will live on through the transdisciplinary team she built. Kiefe's reduction in responsibility will enable her to spend more time mentoring the next generation, be with her family, and travel the world.

Celine Larkin, PhD, is a consultant and collaborator on the Dissemination and Community Engagement Unit (DanCE). She is an affiliate in Emergency Medicine and Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. Her research focuses on the detection and treatment of suicide risk in health care settings, with an emphasis on technology-facilitated implementation and stakeholder engagement. Dr. Larkin has tested the acceptability and feasibility of digital suicide assessment and safety planning tools within acute care settings, and in implementing suicide risk screening protocols as part of the ED-SAFE 2 study. 

Jung Ae Lee, PhD, is a lead faculty statistician of the CAPES and serves as an assistant professor of biostatistics at the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences (PQHS) at the UMass Chan Medical School. She received a PhD in statistics from the University of Georgia in 2013 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Transdisciplinary Research on Energetics and Cancer (TREC, NIH NCI U54) at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. At the University of Arkansas (2016–21), Dr. Lee served as an assistant professor and co-investigator on numerous interdisciplinary agricultural projects funded by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), covering topics such as plant and livestock diseases, crop yield, plant injury, rice genetics, nutrition, water quality, and food security. This early academic path significantly broadened her research spectrum—from human to nonhuman subjects and from traditional experimental design to pragmatic trials—equipping her as a well-rounded statistician in public health, agricultural sciences and medical research. Lee's primary research area in statistics is statistical inference for high-dimension, low-sample size data. She is passionate about achieving two goals throughout hercareer: deepening my statistical research and providing the most useful statistical theory to a broader audience through effective collaboration. Her recent research includes analyzing electronic health record (EHR) data to characterize cancer comorbidities and integrating clinical and socio-environmental strategies to improve survivors' quality of life. In CAPES, Lee is a co-lead of the Methods Core (with Catarina Kiefe, PhD, MD, and Emmanuel Agu, PhD) and Data Analysis Unit (with Bruce Barton, PhD). Her role includes supervising the Complementary Randomized Controlled Trial and Real-world Study for Efficacy, Effectiveness, and Implementation Design (CREID) component within Jaspr, a signature project of CAPES.

Stephenie Lemon, PhD, MS, is professor and chief of the Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at UMass Chan Medical School. As of fall 2024, she is the holder of the Barbara Helen Smith Chair in Preventive and Behavioral Medicine. Dr. Lemon is a recognized leader in chronic disease prevention and control research, and in implementation science and community engagement research. Her research addresses the role of contextual factors, including the built environment, community characteristics, systems factors and social relationships of health and health behaviors. Lemon serves as co-director of the UMass Chan Prevention Research Center, director of the Community Engagement Core of the Medical School's Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and co-principal investigator of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-funded Physical Activity Policy Research and Evaluation Network. She is a dedicated mentor and educator. She serves as co-director of a National Cancer Institute-funded postdoctoral training program in implementation science and as co-director of a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-funded institutional K12 program in implementation science.

Wenjun Li, PhD, holds a PhD in biostatistics and epidemiology, and is a professor of public health (biostatistics) at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dr. Li’s lab conducts NIH- and state-funded population health and clinical studies. He has substantial experience and is well-published in research on racial/ethnic and sex disparities in health, health behaviors, and health care. He has long term research expertise in substance use epidemiology and intervention studies, patient reported outcomes after total joint replacement, musculoskeletal conditions, healthy aging, physical activity, mobility, accidental falls, and mental health issues in older adults.

Feifan Liu, PhD, is co-lead of the ADAPT exploratory project within CAPES. He is a data scientist trained in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI), specifically focusing on natural language processing and machine learning. His research focuses on exploiting advanced computational models to analyze heterogeneous and complex electronic health records (EHRs) data for health care data mining, predictive modeling, and preventative data analytics. He has successfully applied traditional machine learning and deep learning techniques, including transfer learning, multi-task learning, hierarchical learning, to transform both structured and unstructured clinical data towards improving patient care and enhancing clinical decision support systems. As a leading data scientist on suicide research projects, Dr. Liu led two funded supplement grants to explore natural language processing and machine learning for suicidal encounter identification and suicide risk prediction using EHR data. He has also been actively engaged in the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) common data model community on prediction modeling and health equity research. ADAPT aims to assess and adapt machine learning-based suicide risk prediction algorithms regarding the generalizability and transferability when translated to different health care contexts. 

Richard Lopez, PhD, a social neuroscientist and assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), investigates the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotion regulation to improve health and wellbeing in daily life. His Social Neuroscience of Affective Processes (SNAP) Lab at WPI develops personalized, psychologically informed interventions aimed at improving young people's mental health. Recently, the SNAP Lab has identified psychological factors linked to social media use that could be targeted in interventions to reduce anxiety and depression. As a CAPES scholar, Dr. Lopez is eager to expand his research program, collaborating with clinicians to enhance understanding of suicide prediction and prevention, with a particular focus on early, technology-based intervention strategies.

Daniel Mullin, PsyD, MPH, is the director of the Center for Integrated Primary Care and a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. He is a clinician, educator, researcher, and consultant specializing in the integration of behavioral health and primary care services. Dr. Mullin maintains a clinical practice embedded in the Barre Family Health Center, a rural family medicine residency practice in Massachusetts. He is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers and provides training in Motivational Interviewing to health care providers.

Camille Nebeker, EdD, MS, is lead of the Ethics Unit within CAPES. She is a professor with the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Design Lab and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science. She direct sthe UCSD Research Ethics Program and the ReCODE Health center — both provide education and consultation services. UCSD's ReCODE Health group also conducts empirical research to guide ethical practices in health research that involves pervasive sensors, mobile apps, social media, and machine learning/artificial intelligence. Dr. Nebeker applies a human-centered design approach to shape ethical research practices (e.g., risk assessment, informed consent, return of results), which has led to development of decision support tools (see: Digital Health Checklist and Framework and Connected and Open Research Ethics platform). Publications related to her work are accessible at https://escholarship.org/uc/recodehealth_publications.

Benjamin Nephew, PhD works with Dean Jean King at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Their program of research is focused on identifying and studying neurobehavioral mechanisms of mental illness and developing effective interventions. Recent projects include using functional MRI (fMRI) to identify the neural correlates of mindfulness-based stress reduction as part of a stage IIa randomized clinical trial, and using fMRI data combined with related clinical measures to develop machine learning based early predictors of severe depression and suicidality. Dr. Nephew developed a transgenerational social stress based rodent model of postpartum depression/anxiety, and related clinical work explores the role of behavioral hormones, discrimination, and epigenetic changes in postpartum depression/anxiety. His current focus is on applying machine learning with an array of biopsychosocial data from a clinical trial to predict the response to a mindfulness intervention for chronic low back pain. He is also involved in a project using machine learning to predict anxiety, depression, and suicidality in middle and high school students, and an associated initiative is exploring the impact of social media on youth mental health.

Barton W. Palmer, PhD, is a professor of psychiatry at University of San Diego and co-lead of the Ethics Unit. He has been actively conducting clinical research for over 25 years, and has served as lead as well as collaborator on numerous NIH-funded and other funded grants for empirical studies related to issues in research ethics, including informed consent, decision making capacity, and participant  perspectives on research participation. Dr. Palmer has been active in teaching trainees research ethics through the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Research Ethics Program since 2022 (Director: Camille Nebeker, EdD, MS). He served on the UCSD Biomedical Institutional Review Board (IRB) from 2002–2015, and as study section chair for the NIH Center for Scientific Review Societal and Ethical Issues in Research Study section from 2013–2015. Palmer also served on the American Psychological Association Committee on Human Research from 2014–2017.

Ekaterina Pivovarova, PhD, is co-lead of the Implementation Science Unit and lead of the Evaluation Unit of CAPES. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and an associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community at UMass Chan Medical School. Dr. Pivovarova's research uses implementation science techniques to improve access to care for individuals with legal involvement and struggling with substance use and mental health disorders. Her work aims to improve collaboration (and in turn, treatment engagement and retention for at-risk individuals) between health care and legal systems by using empirically driven approaches. Pivovarova is the recipient of a National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) K23 Career Development Award and she serves as the co-investigator of a NIDA-funded UG1 center grant to examine the state-wide implementation of Medications for Opioid Use Disorders in jails. She is the mPI of a NIDA UC2 capacity building core that provides research training for junior investigators, clinicians, and criminal legal scholars in correctional health settings. She is excited to bring my experience working at the intersection of health and correctional systems, implementation science, and evaluations to advance the aims of CAPES.

Serena Rajabiun, PhD, is the co-lead of the CAPES Economic Evaluation Unit. As a health services researcher with implementation science training, her work focuses on developing and replicating evidence-based and informed interventions to improve access to and the quality of health care services for vulnerable populations, including adults and youth living with HIV, cis- and transgender women, immigrants, and people experiencing homelessness. Dr. Rajabiun is specifically interested in community-engaged, multilevel interventions that strengthen our health care workforce to address the social determinants of health and deliver care that is cost-effective and reduces inequities. She uses implementation science frameworks to study the integration of non-clinical community health workers (CHWs), including peer/patient navigators on health care teams and the development, implementation, and evaluation of policies to enhance organizational capacity to deliver culturally relevant, patient centered care. She has developed and tested training curricula for supervisors, CHWs and peers on the impact on team coordination, communication and partnerships. Rajabiun conducts cost and cost-effectiveness analyses of these interventions in single and multisite settings to provide information for adaptation to and scaling to other health care settings. She has implemented and evaluated models of care that address the social determinants of health for people with HIV. Thus, she has experience with economic evaluations and implementation science relevant to CAPES.

Martin Reznek, MD, MBA, FACEP, is the professor and executive vice chair for clinical operations and education in the Department of Emergency Medicine at UMass Chan Medical School. He recently stepped down from serving as the founding director of the Richard V. Aghababian Emergency Medicine Leadership and Administrative Fellowship at the Medical School after serving for over a decade in that role. Dr. Reznek completed emergency medicine residency training at the Detroit Receiving Hospital/Wayne State University School of Medicine, where he also served as chief resident, and he has completed two fellowships—one in medical simulation research and curriculum design at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the second in emergency department and hospitaladministration at the Detroit Medical Center/Wayne State University. Reznek is active in educational advancement and original research, with interests in implementation science, quality/patient safety, emergency department/hospital operations and curriculum design and development, and he has and continues to serve in numerous leadership roles for regional and national professional organizations.  

Anthony J. Rothschild, MD, is co-lead on the ADAPT project of CAPES. He is the Irving S. and Betty Brudnick Endowed Chair, professor of psychiatry, and Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences vice chair for research at the UMass Chan Medical School and its clinical partner, UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester. Dr. Rothschild has spent more than 40 years in both clinical and research settings diagnosing and treating patients with difficult to treat depressions such as psychotic depression and treatment resistant depression, which are associated with increased rates of suicide, and studying the diagnostic challenges, biology, course, and treatment of these serious disorders. He is best suited to co-lead CAPES projects, given his expertise and long-standing research in implementing novel treatment paradigms within outpatient health care settings.

Elke Rundensteiner, PhD, is the William Smith Dean's Professor of Computer Science and founding head of Data Science and of Artificial Intelligence at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She serves as a co-lead of the LEMURS project within CAPES. She is passionate about applying innovative data-driven technologies to accelerate the digital transformation of solving mental-health illnesses in health care settings. Dr. Rundensteiner has successfully led more than 55 extramural studies with well over $20 million in funding focused on data-intensive technology development for challenging data-centric application problems from mental health screening, adverse event detection, data modeling of infection spread, data integration for clinical decision making, machine learning for screening for ailments, and AI for electronic health record data. Specific to CAPES, Rundensteiner has developed mental health screening solutions using artificial intelligence and deep learning that leverage smartphone data, including voice, text messages, GPS, and social media. Her research resulted in the development of the EMU screening app, which, in a CAPES project, will be deployed and studied for its accelerated adoption as evidence-based screening solution of suicide ideation and behavior risk to support vulnerable communities, in particular students on a college campus. 

Kathryn Sabella, PhD is an assistant professor at UMass Chan Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, deputy director of the Implementation Science and Practice Advances Research Center (iSPARC), and director of the Transitions to Adulthood Center for Research. She is one of only a few national scholars in young adult mental health and has emerged as one of the leading experts in the field. Her research employs qualitative and quantitative methods and community-based participatory methods to a) create new knowledge about the needs and experiences of young adults with serious mental health conditions, and b) apply that knowledge to the development, testing and implementation of age-appropriate and culturally-appealing evidence-based practices that can improve the lives of these young adults. She is co-principal investigator of the Center for Community Inclusion and Reflective Collaboration (CIRC Center) that seeks to improve community participation outcomes among young adults with mental health conditions from backgrounds that have been marginalized (NIDILRR/ACL/HHS# 90RTCP0010).  

Bengisu Tulu, PhD, is a professor of information systems at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, co-project lead for the CATS-PC exploratory project and co-lead for the Methods Core Person-Centered Design Unit within CAPES. She is passionate about applying user centered design to develop engaging digital health solutions. Her research focused on designing and implementing digital health interventions to support patients and clinicians managing chronic conditions. These digital interventions targeted suicide prevention, weight management, perinatal depression, chronic wound management, and substance use. Dr. Tulu has worked on commercialization of digital health solutions and worked with small businesses who provide these services in NIH-funded Small Business Innovation Research/Technology Transfer grants. Her expertise is in technology implementations, user-centered design and analytics in health care contexts. She is excited about the opportunities CAPES will facilitate in creating cost-effective, scalable technology-based solutions that save lives.

Hong Yu, PhD, is an elected fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. She is the founding director of the Center for Biomedical and Health Research in Data Sciences and a tenured professor in the Miner School of Computer & Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). She also holds adjunct faculty appointments at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and UMass Chan Medical School, where she was a tenured full professor prior to joining UML. 

In addition, Dr. Yu serves as a research health scientist and principal investigator at the Center for Healthcare Organization & Implementation Research at the VA Bedford Healthcare System. She earned her PhD in biomedical informatics from Columbia University. 

Yu holds multiple U.S. patents and has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of natural language processing, informatics, and artificial intelligence, published in leading journals and conference proceedings in computer science and biomedical informatics. She has mentored over 50 trainees, many of whom have gone on to become faculty members or leaders in industry. 

Collaborator on OHDSI Pilot Project, collaborator in the Methods Core. Adrian Zai, MD, PhD, MPH, is the chief research informatics officer at UMass Chan Medical School and an associate professor in the Health Informatics and Implementation Science Division. He directs the Research Informatics Core, which caters to all clinical data and data science needs for research at UMass Chan. Dr. Zai is also responsible for overseeing the institution's strategic direction of research informatics infrastructure. His academic research focuses on developing and implementing population-based informatics initiatives. His work employs decision support systems, artificial intelligence, and implementation science to optimize the management of patient populations. Through this innovative research, his aim is to enhance patient care and outcomes by harnessing the power of technology and data-driven solutions. In the CAPES project, Zai's goal is to ensure that the Research Informatics Core provides all necessary support, particularly by supplying the clinical data required for the Jaspr Project and facilitating the transfer of de-identified data from partner sites to UMass Chan for harmonization and analysis. 

Martha Zimmermann, PhD, is an assistant professor in psychiatry at UMass Chan Medical School. Her PhD is in Clinical Psychology, from the University of Nevada, Reno. She partners with Nancy Byatt, DO, MS, MBA, in the Massachusetts Child Psychiatry Access Program for Moms. Her research focuses on developing scalable interventions to prevent perinatal mood and anxiety disorders particularly using digital health technologies. She was also chosen as one of the principal investigators of the CAPES Pilot Project entitled “Beta-Testing Reaching Calm: Exploring Digital Approaches to Address Suicide Risk in Obstetric Settings.”