Mark Kalinich. MD PhD (PGY4)

Education

Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Combined MD/PhD program)

Research Interests

AI safety in mental health; precision approaches to translational psychiatry, including digital psychiatry and biomarker development

 

Dr. Kalinich started his research career developing targeted drug delivery systems as a biochemical engineering undergrad in the Langer lab at MIT. He then completed his PhD in the Haber-Maheswaran and Toner groups, focused on combining engineering, molecular biology, and bioinformatics approaches to develop blood-based diagnostics for the earlier detection and longitudinal monitoring of cancer. His PhD exposed him to the inadequacies of contemporary multi-omics analytics solutions, and inspired him to co-found Watershed Bio to enable drug discovery researchers to build better drugs faster for the patients that need them the most. In the clinical years of medical school, he found himself repeatedly drawn to caring for psychiatric patients. He fell in love with the work not only as a physician, but as a scientist, recognizing psychiatry as a field where precision and data-driven innovation had been underutilized yet held enormous potential. As a psychiatry research-track resident at BIDMC, he now works in the laboratory of Dr. John Torous to leverage digital phenotyping and machine learning to improve the early detection, treatment monitoring, and personalization of care for individuals with mental illness.

Selected Recent Publications (Full profile)

Kalinich M et al. Long therapy conversations degrade AI detection of suicidal ideation relative to clinicians: a preregistered study. In submission, pre-print available 

Kalinich M et al. Evaluating the effect of mental health fine-tuning relative to other model characteristics on LLM safety performance. In revision, pre-print available. 

Nelson BW, Kalinich M, Torous J. Specialized or General Purpose- the Wrong Question for Mental Health Safety. JAMA 2026. doi: 10.1001/jama.2026.11448

Kalinich M et al. Leveraging simulation to provide a practical framework for assessing the novel scope of risk of LLMs in healthcare. BMJ Mental Health Juune 2026. doi:10.1136/bmjment-2026-302626

Luccarelli J, Kalinich M et al. The Catatonia Quick Screen (CQS): A Rapid Screening Tool for Catatonia in Adult and Pediatric Populations. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2025.

Patents

Wang A, Wang J, Kalinich M. “User interface controls for visual software modification.” US-12242823-B2. 2025.

Awards

2026 Harry and Maida Solomon Award for Best Poster Presentation by a Resident, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School (Co-Winner)

2025 Honorable Mention Award, Outstanding Resident Award Program, National Institute of Mental Health

2025 Harvard Medical Student Teaching Award

Appointed National Committees

APA Council on Digital Health, Innovation, and Technology (2026)

Sam Powell, MD PhD (PGY3)

Education

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (Combined MD/PhD program)

Research Interests

Precision psychiatry, with a focus on leveraging large, multi-modal datasets to predict important outcomes such as treatment response, episode recurrence, and suicide attempts

 

For his thesis studies at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai MD/PhD program, Dr. Powell utilized human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons to model molecular genetic mechanisms in schizophrenia, with a particular focus on three-dimensional chromatin structures such as promoter-enhancer loops. He was also involved in a student-run and faculty-supervised free mental health clinic, where he trained as a CBT psychotherapist and saw patients for seven years. He later went on to become the clinic's student director, chief teaching senior, and chair, and he also published several clinical research papers showing excellent outcomes in the clinic. In the later part of medical school, Sam served as a psychotherapist for a clinical trial testing a new psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder called cognitive reappraisal by distancing. As a research-track psychiatry resident at BIDMC, Dr. Powell will be conducting research with the Breakthrough Discoveries in Thriving with Bipolar Disorders Consortium, a large, prospective cohort and clinical implementation study focused on developing and testing clinical prediction models for treatment response and recurrence of mood episodes. At BIDMC, Dr. Powell also serves on the grand rounds subcommittee and will be a co-president of the Harvard Brain Initiative inter-institutional psychiatry research networking group.

Selected Recent Publications

Powell SK, et al. 3D genetic architecture of schizophrenia risk across three neuronal subtypes. Molecular Psychiatry 2026;31:2216-2231.

Powell SK et al. Provision of Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depression and Anxiety Disorders by Medical Student Trainees. Academic Psychiatry 2024;48:10-17.

Powell SK et al. Induction of Dopaminergic Neurons for Neuronal Subtype-Specific Modeling of Psychiatric Disease Risk. Molecular Psychiatry 2023 May;28(5):1970-1982.

Awards

2026 APA Foundation Diversity Leaderhip Fellowship

2025 Harvard Medical Student Teaching Award

2024 Graduation with distinction in research, medical education, and community service/global health

2021 Excellence in Leadership Award

2021 Semifinalist, American Medical Association Research Challenge

2021 Best Oral Presentation Award, Early Career Investigator Program, World Congress of Psychiatric Genomics

Melissa Hwang, MD (PGY2)

Education

Boston University School of Medicine (MD)

Research Interests

Neural circuitry of psychosis


 

Dr. Hwang was first exposed to functional neuroimaging through her role as a clinical research assistant at McLean Hospital, studying the neurobiological basis of auditory hallucinations in psychotic and trauma spectrum disorders. This inspired a deep interest in understanding brain functional connectivity, specifically the association between cerebellar-cortical abnormalities and psychosis symptomatology. She hopes to continue this work and explore how neuromodulatory techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation may provide a way to elucidate causal as well as therapeutic relationships between brain circuitry and psychosis.

Selected Recent Publications (Full Profile)

Hwang M, Brady R. Neural Circuitry and Therapeutic Targeting of Depressive Symptoms in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders. Am J Psychiatry 2024 Oct 1;181(10):858-60.

Hwang M et al. Auditory hallucinations across the psychosis spectrum: Evidence of dysconnectivity involving cerebellar and temporal lobe regions. Neuroimage Clin 2021;32:102893.

Chan SY, Brady R, Hwang M et al. Heterogeneity of Outcomes and Network Connectivity in Early-Stage Psychosis: A Longitudinal Study. Schizophr Bull 2021 Jan 23;47(1):138-48.

Awards

2026 Harry and Maida Solomon Award for Best Poster Presentation by a Resident, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School (Co-Winner)

Yoelkys Morales, MD PhD (PGY2)

Education

Tufts University School of Medicine (Combined MD/PhD Program)

Research Interests

Global mental health and cross-cultural psychiatry. Specifically, the unique psychiatric challenges faced by displaced populations and the complex trauma responses to the immigration process and possible interventions

Dr. Morales became interested in implementation of psychosocial interventions during his PhD work where he led qualitative studies focused on the barriers and challenges faced by patients with a substance use disorder history or history of incarceration and their access to the standard of care while hospitalized. This interest was expanded during a global health rotation in Panama where he was exposed to many of the challenges face by displaced populations before, during, and after the immigration process. In addition, he has also worked on projects utilizing natural language processing to improve care for people who use drugs, implanted new practices for patients with HIV who are hospitalized, and worked with Dr. John Torous on the implementation of digital mental health interventions. I hope to meld these interests moving forward to implement novel strategies of digital health interventions and policy advocacy work to improve the care of displaced populations.

Selected Recent Publications (Full Profile)

Davis KP, Morales Y et al. Critical role of growth medium for detecting drug interactions in Gram-negative bacteria that model in vivo responses. MBio 2024 Mar 13;15(3):e0015924

Morales Y et al. “They Just Assume That We’re All Going to Do the Wrong Thing With It. It’s Just Not True”: Stakeholder Perspectives About Peripherally Inserted Central Catheters in People Who Inject Drugs. Open Forum Infect Dis. 2022 Oct 19;9(10):ofac364.

Benrubi L, Sato T, Westgard LK, Zollo-Venecek K, Scorates B, Sweigart, Ridgway JP, Suzuki J, Morales Y et al. Sensitivity and Specificity of Natural Language Processing Systems for Identification of Hospitalized People Who Use Drugs. Open Forum Infectious Diseases 2025;olaf370.

Allison Farrar, MD DPhil (PGY1)

Education

Harvard Medical School (MD)

University of Oxford (DPhil)

Research Interests

Quantitative data in psychiatry, including wearable devices and digital mental health interventions

Dr. Farrar is passionate about using tools from physics and technology to improve diagnostics, clinical care, and health equity. Using her background as a physicist, she has worked on projects ranging from engineering magnetic nanodevices to using MRI biopsies to reduce procedure burden for patients with sickle cell disease. For her doctoral thesis, she joined an interdisciplinary team in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford working on detecting antibiotic resistance in less than 1 hour using microfluidics and table-top microscopes. Their method allows simultaneous detection of antibiotic resistance and species identification, with >99% accuracy. Dr. Farrar also led efforts to better understand their dataset using insights from volunteer citizen scientists, leading a project called Infection Inspection that recruited more than 5,000 volunteers who contributed more than 1 million classifications and was featured in New Scientist magazine. While in Oxford, she became involved with mental health work through Oxford Nightline, one of the busiest student-run crisis support services in the UK. When she came back to Harvard Medical School for her clinical rotations (at BIDMC!), she was drawn to the clinical work of psychiatry as well as the unanswered questions about how best to serve and treat patients with mental illness. As a research-track resident, she is interested in exploring how insights from quantitative datasets, including wearable devices and digital mental health, can improve psychiatric diagnostics and accessibility.

Selected Recent Publications

Farrar, A., Turner, P., El Sayyed, H. et al. Ribosome phenotypes for rapid classification of antibiotic-susceptible and resistant strains of Escherichia coli. Commun Biol 8, 319 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-07740-6

Farrar, A.*, Feehily, C.*, Turner, P. et al. Infection Inspection: using the power of citizen science for image-based prediction of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli treated with ciprofloxacin. Sci Rep 14, 19543 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-69341-3

Selected Awards

2020-2024, Clarendon Scholarship, University of Oxford

Skylar Wright, MD PhD (PGY1)

Education

University of Connecticut School of Medicine (Combined MD/PhD Program)

Research Interests

Neuro- and systemic inflammation, peripheral biomarkers, and neuroimaging in the development and progression of severe and persistent mental illness

Dr. Wright's PhD work focused on innate immune signaling, host-pathogen interactions, and inflammatory cell death pathways, with emphasis on how dysregulated inflammatory responses propagate morbidity and mortality in infection and septic shock. She developed an interest in psychiatry during the clinical years of medical school and became particularly intrigued by the potential role of inflammatory responses in various psychiatric diseases. As a research track resident, Dr. Wright hopes to combine immunology, biomarker discovery, and neuroimaging approaches to investigate how peripheral and central immune dysregulation contribute to the development and progression of psychotic and affective disorders.

Selected Recent Publications

Graziano V, Porat J, Ah Kioon M., Mejdrova I, Matz A, Lebedenko C, Chai P, Pluvinage J, Ricci-Azevedo R, Harrison A, Wright SS et al (2025). RNA N-glycosylation enables innate immune evasion and homeostatic efferocytosis. Nature, 645(8081), 784–792.

Wright SS, Kumari, P, Fraile-Ágreda V et al. (2025). Transplantation of gasdermin pores by extracellular vesicles propagates pyroptosis to bystander cells. Cell, 188(2), 280–291.e17.

Wright SS, Wang C, Ta A et al. (2024). A bacterial toxin co-opts caspase-3 to disable active gasdermin D and limit macrophage pyroptosis. Cell Reports, 43(4), 114004.

Awards

2026 The James H. Foster MD Teaching Award for Excellence in Medical Student Education

2023 UConn Health Graduate Student Research Day Best Oral Presentation