Welcome to the Curtis Lab

The Curtis Lab pairs traditional methodologies with computational psychiatry to study the digital phenotypes of people who use drugs. While much of the labs focus is on converting raw signals from digital data sources into useful clinical insights, the TTRU is very much committed to solving problems experienced by people in recovery and undergoing substance use treatment. Through clinical research, the Curtis lab intersects addiction treatment, computational psychiatry, and innovative technologies. Using natural-language processing, digital phenotyping, and deep learning, the lab focuses on enhancing precision assessment of substance use and behavioral predictors using intensive longitudinal data and integrating passive sensor data from smartphones and wearable devices. Among others, an overall goal is to develop personalized smartphone interventions for individuals living with SUD to enhance the recovery experience. Other areas of research focus on the intersect between addiction and Covid and on the impact of stigma on addiction.

We are looking for passionate new PhD students, Postdocs, and Master students to join the team (more info) !

News

April 26, 2024

Zachary Fried’s abstract ‘Exploring Sexualized Cannabis Use on Reddit: Patterns, Motivations, and Public Health Implications’ was accepted at the Data for the Wellbeing of the Most Vulnerable workshop at ICWSM 2024.

April 24, 2024

Two abstracts were accepted to IC2S2 2024 ‘Exploring Sexualized Cannabis Use on Reddit: Patterns, Motivations, and Public Health Implications’ (from Zachary Fried) and ‘The State of Modern LLMs for Substance Use Help’ (from Ankit Aich) .

February 26, 2024

Kelsey Isman’s abstract ‘Communities at the Crossroads: Exploring Cultural Variations in Opioid Epidemic Outcomes in the United States’ was accepted at the College on Problems of Drug Dependence conference.

February 20, 2024

Ankit Aich’s paper ‘Towards Comprehensive Language Analysis for Clinically Enriched Spontaneous Dialogue’ was accepted LREC-COLING 2024.

February 5, 2024

Ankit Aich joined the lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

January 31, 2024

Sunny Rai’s paper ‘Key language markers of depression depend on race’ was accepted PNAS.

October 19, 2023

Tingting Liu’s paper ‘Differential temporal utility of passively sensed smartphone features for depression and anxiety symptom prediction: a longitudinal cohort study’ was accepted at npj Mental Health Research.

October 9, 2023

Salvatore Giorgi and Garrick Sherman’s paper ‘AWARE-TEXT: An Android Package for Mobile Phone Based Text Collection and On-Device Processing’ was accepted at the NLP-OSS workshop at EMNLP 2024.

October 9, 2023

Salvatore Giorgi’s paper ‘A linguistic analysis of dehumanization toward substance use across three decades of news articles’ was accepted at Frontiers in Public Health.