Topic: Bridging Minds and Machines: Leveraging Digital Technologies and Machine Learning for Mental Health Enhancement
Speaker: Nils Opel
Distinguished Professor for Translational Psychiatry
University Hospital Jena, Germany
Dr. Opel combines a strong foundation in clinical medicine and psychology, exemplifying his commitment to advancing therapeutic approaches. He has established a robust research line focused on leveraging digital applications for symptom assessment and prediction, employing Machine Learning techniques for Clinical Decision Support. This initiative fosters a fruitful exchange with the field of Medical Informatics, showcasing Dr. Opel’s dedication to pushing the boundaries of psychiatric research through innovative technological approaches. He actively contributes to collaborative and interdisciplinary research efforts, serving as the Co-Chair of the ENIGMA “BMI X” Working Group.
In addition, Dr. Opel leads the research infrastructure of Federated Cohort Management at the newly established German Center for Mental Health. He also serves as the representative in the DZG-wide Research IT Working Group. Dr. Opel brings extensive expertise in the establishment and utilization of digital cohorts, harmonization of data acquisition in research and clinical routine as well as the utilization of multimodal data for the development of risk assessment & clinical decision support systems in psychiatry.
Topic: Digital Medicine for Addiction prevention and treatment in China
Speaker: Min Zhao, M.D., Ph.D.
President, Shanghai Mental Health Center
Consultant Psychiatrist, Professor, President of Shanghai Mental Health Center
Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine
Dr. Zhao is a member of International Advisory Group a member of the expert group and Field Studies Coordination Group of the ICD-11, and a member of the Informal Scientific Network of UNODC. She is the Chair of WADD (World Association on Dual Disorders ), Member of International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM) Global Experts Network (ISAM-GEN) China Chapter, President of Chinese Psychiatric Hospital Association, Vice-president of Chinese Society of Psychiatry, and vice-president of Chinese psychiatrist Association. She has published more than 200 papers, edited and translated 9 books. Zhao has been rewarded the Shanghai Leading Talent and Shanghai Outstanding Academic Leader. She has also won the National Science and Technology Excellence Award, Shanghai Science and Technology Excellence Award, Wuzhou Women’s Science and Technology Award, and NIH/NIDA Outstanding Scientist Award for International Collaboration.
Topic: Connecting Computational Psychiatry, Large and Small: Bringing mechanism to the clinic
Speaker: Philip Corlett, PhD
Associate Professor; Department of Psychiatry
Wu Tsai Institute for Cognition; Yale University
For the past 20 years, Phil has been interested in the mind and brain, how they relate to one another and how those relations break down in serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia – giving rise to hallucinations and delusions. He has used functional neuroimaging, behavioral testing and computational modeling of behavior to build and test models of how these symptoms arise. He focuses on creative solutions to difficult problems and critical stress tests of accepted theories. He is an iconoclast with an appetite to build better and more veridical understanding of the processes that drive human behavior and brain function. He has been a NARSAD young Investigator, a OneMind Rising Star, he has won translational research awards, and his work has been covered by the Atlantic, the BBC, and the Wall Street Journal. He also collects sneakers and once met Jackie Chan.
Topic: Using Generative Models of the Brain to Improve the Application of AI to Mental Health.
Speaker: Michael Breakspear, MB BS, BSc, BA, FRANZCP, PhD
Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry
University of Newcastle, Australia
Michael Breakspear is a Psychiatrist and Neuroscientist researching the principles of brain function in health and in mental illness. Professor Breakspear leads the Systems Neuroscience Group – a team of psychiatrists, physicists, psychologists and neuroimaging scientists at the University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute, Australia. His team use computational modelling to study the generative processes underlying bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, dementia and in healthy ageing.
Professor Breakspear studied medicine at the University of Sydney, combined with degrees in Arts (philosophy and mathematics) and Science (neuroscience and physics). He completed a PhD in psychiatry followed by post-doctoral training in theoretical physics.
Michael is a Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists with a weekly clinic at the Awabakal Aboriginal Medical Service. He is Chair-elect of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping and a Senior Editor at PLoS Mental Health.
Topic: Embodied foundation model for mental health
Speaker: Yanan Sui
Associate Professor
Tsinghua University
Yanan Sui is dedicated to the research of human neuro-musculo-skeletal modeling and control, with applications in embodied intelligence and brain-machine interaction. He received his B.S. from Tsinghua University, his Ph.D. from Caltech, and did postdoctoral work at Caltech and Stanford University. His work on safe optimization has been included in textbooks at Stanford and other universities. He co-won the Best Conference Paper Award and the Best Paper Award on Human-Robot Interaction at the 2020 International Conference on Robotics and Automation. His work has been successfully applied to the clinical treatment of neural injuries in China and the United States. For his contribution to the interdisciplinary field of artificial intelligence and neural engineering, he was selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 in China.
Topic: AI-Driven Approaches for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection and Prediction
Speaker: Ioannis Paschalidis
Distinguished Professor, College of Engineering
Boston University
Ioannis (Yannis) Paschalidis is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering, and Founding Professor of Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University. He is the Director of the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering — BU’s federation and convergence accelerator of centers and initiatives in this area of research. He obtained a Diploma (1991) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and an M.S. (1993) and a Ph.D. (1996) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His current research interests lie in the fields of optimization, control, stochastic systems, robust learning, computational medicine, and computational biology. He has published a monograph and more than 280 refereed papers in these topics, and he has been the primary advisor to 32 Ph.D. theses. His work has been recognized with a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, several best paper awards, and an IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge Award. His work on health informatics won an IEEE Computer Society Crowd Sourcing Prize and a best paper award by the International Medical Informatics Associations (IMIA). He was an invited participant at the 2002 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium organized by the National Academy of Engineering, at the 2014 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAFKI) Conference, and at a 2024 National Academies Symposium on Alzheimer’s disease. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control), and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. From 2013 to 2019 he was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and he is the General Co-Chair of the 2025 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.
Topic: Bit-LLM: Large Language Model for mental healthcare via wearable signals
Speaker: Ye Li
Chair Professor
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology
Li’s main research areas include wearable healthcare systems, medical artificial intelligence (AI), and large health models. He has undertaken projects related to cardiovascular health and mental health from the National Key R&D Program, CAS Pilot Project, National Natural Science Foundation of China, etc. He has published more than 170 papers and was selected as one of the top 2% scientists globally by Stanford University. He serves as an editorial board member or executive editor for renowned international journals such as Information Fusion and Physiological Measurement in the fields of AI and biomedical engineering. He has been granted 82 domestic and international invention patents, 16 of which have been commercialized. He has transferred and developed 3 CFDA registered wearable healthcare devices covering more than 35,000 people annually. He has led 3 national and ITU standards related to e-health and partially contributed to the guidance of health information systems by WHO. Professor Li Ye has won the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technology Invention Award, Patent Award, and the Chinese Medical Association Health Management Award, etc.
Topic: Hybrid Neuro-Cognitive Modeling Reveals the Memory Dynamics Shaping Human Reward-Guided Learning
Speaker: Dr. Maria Eckstein
Research Scientist, DeepMind
A senior research scientist at Google DeepMind with a PhD in psychology from UC Berkeley, Dr. Eckstein’s focus is situated at the intersection between two fields, combining methods from artificial intelligence (e.g., reinforcement learning, neural networks) with those from cognitive psychology and neuroscience (e.g., controlled lab experiments, moment-to-moment neural recordings). She is particularly interested in questions that are fundamental to both fields, including learning, decision making, cognitive representations, and structured thought.
Topic: Applications of Large Language Models in Depression Research
Speaker: Jianhua Chen
Chief Physician, Research Professor, and Ph.D. Supervisor
Shanghai Mental Health Center
Dr. Chen has received scholarships to and was selected for postdoctoral research at King’s College London and the Global Clinical Scholars Research Training Program at Harvard Medical School. He specializes in the comorbidity of mental disorders and physical diseases and has published over 100 papers in academic journals such as Nature series of journals, Lancet series of journals, BMJ series of journals., and the Chinese Journal of Psychiatry, with an h-index of 32. He has led more than 10 national and provincial research projects.
Dr. Chen has been honored as one of the China’s Outstanding Young Psychiatrists, Shanghai Outstanding Academic Leader, Shanghai Top Young Talents, and Shanghai Outstanding Young Medical Professionals.
Topic: Computational Mechanisms of Treatments for Depression
Speaker: Quentin Huys
Professor of Computational Psychiatry; Applied Computational Psychiatry Lab, Division of Psychiatry and Queen Square Institute of Neurology, UCL
Deputy Director, Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, UCL
Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist, Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust
Quentin Huys is Professor of Computational Psychiatry in the Division ofPsychiatry and the Institute of Neurology at University College London. He isthe deputy director of the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatryand Ageing Research, and honorary consultant psychiatrist with Camden andIslington NHS Foundation Trust. After undergraduate studies at CambridgeUniversity, Quentin his PhD from the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, andhis medical degree at UCL Medical School. He undertook postdoctoral research atthe Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University. He was a seniorresearch fellow at the Translational Neuromodeling Unit at the University ofZurich and ETH during his psychiatry residency at the Hospital of Psychiatry.Quentin is a leader in the field of computational psychiatry, having helped toestablish and developed the field. He has argued that computational techniquesare necessary to bridge between psychiatric symptoms and the underlyingneurobiology. Recently his focus has been on developing computational methods toimprove treatments by identifying the computational mechanisms engaged byvarious treatments.
Topic: AI-guided tools for early prediction of brain and mental health disorders
Speaker: Zoe Kourtzi
Professor of Experimental Psychology
Deputy Head (Research)
University of Cambridge
Zoe Kourtzi is a professor of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Her research aims to develop predictive models of neurodegenerative disease and mental health with translational impact in early diagnosis and personalised interventions. Zoe received her PhD from Rutgers University and was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and Harvard. She was a Senior Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and then a Chair in Brain Imaging at the University of Birmingham, before moving to the University of Cambridge in 2013. She is a Royal Society Industry Fellow, Cambridge University Lead at the Alan Turing Institute and Co-director of Cambridge’s Centre for Data Driven Discovery.
