FEBRUARY 6, 2026
Justin T. Baker, MD, PhD
Director, Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging & Bioinformatics
Scientific Director, Institute for Technology in Psychiatry
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
About the Presentation: Psychiatry has long lacked reliable, quantitative measures, relying instead on subjective clinical impressions. Advances in pervasive computing and digital sensing now make it possible to continuously capture behavioral, cognitive, and contextual data in daily life. Leveraging these multimodal data streams with machine learning and informatics enables the construction of dynamic, personalized phenotypes in serious mental illness that transcend static diagnostic categories. This talk will draw on work from Dr. Baker’s lab using deep phenotyping, mobile sensing, and single-case experimental designs in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I will discuss methods to link behavior, brain function, and illness trajectories, challenges in inference and generalizability, and how these tools can guide interventions—moving psychiatry toward closed-loop, data-driven, and mechanistically informed care.
About the Presenter: Justin T. Baker, MD, PhD, is the scientific director of the McLean Institute for Technology in Psychiatry (ITP) and director of the Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics at McLean Hospital. He is also an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Baker’s research uses both large-scale studies and deep, multilevel phenotyping approaches to understand the nature and underlying biology of mental illnesses. He is a clinical psychiatrist with expertise in schizophrenia and bipolar spectrum disorders and other disorders of emerging adulthood. In 2016, Dr. Baker co-founded the ITP, a first-of-its-kind research and development center to foster tool development and novel applications of consumer technology in psychiatric research and care delivery.