Dr. Nick Jacobson is recruiting undergraduate research assistants in the lab. He has several opportunities that undergraduates could become involved in including:
1. Creating new smartphone applications to assess and treat anxiety, depression, and substance use.
Developing Apps for Mental Health: Very few persons have access to care for their mental health. A major focus of this lab is creating digital solutions to assess and treat mental health problems. The main mental health problems that we treat are anxiety and depressive disorders, although there are opportunities to develop treatments for other types of mental health problems. These include smartphone-based and web-based applications. To date, we have created applications with more than 50,000 installs, and, consequently, this work can have profound and wide impact on persons daily lives.
2. The integration of smartphone-based and wearable data to draw inferences about a person’s mental health status.
Digital phenotyping/passive sensing of mental health: In recent years, wearable devices and smartphone sensors have been used to measure constructs related to psychopathology. The current work requires quantitative interests in applying machine learning and deep learning to smartphone sensor data to determine whether some signals might be fundamentally related to psychopathology processes (e.g. whether we can determine if someone is experiencing an increase in anxiety based on their sleep patterns detected through smartphone accelerometers).
3. Developing statistical methods for densely sampled data collection.
Extensions of modern statistical methods: Current smartphone-based and wearable data collection are limited in their ability to draw strong conclusions about the timing of causal processes. One of our foci is the creation and validation of new tools, including the timing of naturalistic and causal processes within intensive longitudinal data.
Note that Dr. Jacobson is currently recruiting undergraduate research assistants, a lab manager, graduate students, a programmer, and a post-doctoral fellow. If you’re interested in working with Dr. Jacobson please visit http://nicholasjacobson.com/#join and contact Dr. Jacobson directly at Nicholas.C.Jacobson@dartmouth.edu.