CTBH’s Lisa Marsch, Andrew Campbell, and Nicholas Jacobson recently met with TIME Magazine to talk about the current development of Evergreen, an AI-powered chatbot designed by Dartmouth students and faculty to help students thrive.
Excerpts from their conversation appeared last week in the AI in Action section of TIME’s tech newsletter, In the Loop:
Last month, a team at Dartmouth announced the creation of Evergreen, a student wellness tool which harnesses data including sleep patterns and stress-indicators to measure students’ mental health and respond with nudges or personalized recommendations. “Evergreen might sense you’re feeling lonely. It might nudge you to grab a coffee and catch up with a particular friend—because it knows that works for you,” says Professor Andrew Campbell, who is co-leading the project.
Evergreen is currently being developed and tested by more than 100 paid Dartmouth students, and will start trials with students in early 2026. One of its creators, Nicholas Jacobson, previously spearheaded Therabot, the first AI therapy chatbot to undergo a clinical trial. Jacobson acknowledges that there are “major ways” in which implementing AI into mental health care can be harmful. “But I think all of those can be mitigated in systems that are really well and rigorously designed,” he tells TIME.
“We’re going to have over 100,000 human hours that are part of developing the system. It’s not a light-touch approach,” he adds. “It’s going to be very deeply ingrained in ways that are really trying to make these safe and effective.”