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The 2026 American Psychiatric Association (APA) Annual Meeting will be held May 16-20, 2026 in San Francisco, California. This is one of the largest and most established psychiatry conferences, drawing clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and industry leaders. The meeting features a growing programming in digital psychiatry, including sessions on mobile mental-health tools, digital phenotyping, AI in clinical care, telepsychiatry, and more.
Past Webinar
Meet the 2025 Symposium Speakers
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Soumya Choudhary, MSc, PhD
Soumya Choudhary is a dedicated researcher and digital mental health expert currently pursuing a PhD in Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Division of Digital Psychiatry, BIDMC, Harvard Medical School. Soumya holds a Master's degree in Mental Health: Research and Practice from the University of Nottingham, where she specialized in clinical psychology, neuropsychiatry and artificial intelligence. At NIMHANS, Soumya has been involved in Wellcome Trust-funded projects such as the SHARP study, focusing on smartphone-based assessments and relapse prevention in psychosis. Her research integrates advanced data analysis techniques and app-based interventions to enhance mental health care. Soumya has also published extensively in the field of digital mental health, with works exploring digital interventions, machine learning applications in mental health, and relapse prediction in schizophrenia. Soumya is passionate about scaling digital mental health solutions globally, with a focus on low and middle income countries.
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Meghana Keshavan, BS
Meghana Keshavan is a journalist at STAT News, the health care arm of the Boston Globe. She has been covering the biotech sector for more than a decade, reporting on the intersection of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, drug development, and federal health policy. She writes STAT’s Readout newsletter, a daily compendium of the most important technological news in health care — including artificial intelligence.
Her recent coverage includes FDA regulatory processes, advances in mental health treatments, psychedelic-assisted therapy research, and issues affecting the U.S. biopharmaceutical industry.
Meghana joined STAT in 2016. Before that, she worked for news outlets like Thomson Reuters, the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit Metro Times and NPR affiliate WDET. As a young lass, Meghana toiled five years as a research peon in a schizophrenia genetics lab. She once spilled ethidium bromide on herself, and might be a mutant. -

Benjamin W. Nelson, PhD
Dr. Nelson is a Senior Clinical Research Scientist at Verily Life Sciences on the Science and Innovation Team, an Adjunct Professor at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a licensed psychologist. He leads Verily’s mental health science and innovation efforts, advancing precision AI health strategies and developing generative AI–enabled safety systems and clinical decision support tools across the company’s mental and behavioral health portfolio. He also contributes to the Division of Digital Psychiatry at BIDMC, bringing integrated expertise in clinical care, AI, and applied research.
His background spans clinical science, wearable digital biomarker development, AI and LLM evaluation, and the analytical and clinical validation of digital health technologies. He has deep experience in real-world clinical trial design, clinical outcomes research, and translating evidence into product strategy. Dr. Nelson’s research includes more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, multiple book chapters, and conference presentations. Clinically, he has worked across hospital settings and holds APIT certification.
Across his roles, Dr. Nelson focuses on uniting rigorous clinical science with modern digital health technology and AI applications to improve chronic health outcomes. -

Amir Rahmani, PhD
Dr. Amir Rahmani is a Professor of Nursing and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he also holds the Samueli Endowed Chair of Integrative Health. He serves as the Co-Director of the UCI Institute for Future Health and leads the multidisciplinary HealthSciTech Group at UCI. His research spans mHealth, data science, wearable and mobile computing, machine learning and agentic AI, affective computing, and bio-signal processing. Dr. Rahmani's contributions have been recognized with the UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s inaugural Faculty Innovation Fellowship, the Nokia Foundation's Research Excellence Award, and the European Union’s Global Marie Curie Fellowship.
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Steve Siddals, MSc
Steve Siddals is a psychology researcher and technology executive, affiliated to the BIDMC digital psychiatry lab, with an academic background in the psychology and neuroscience of mental health (King's College London MSc) and computer science and mathematics (Oxford University BA), and 25 years' experience leading technology transformation for multinationals.
Last year, Steve led one of the first studies to explore real-life experiences of using tools like ChatGPT for mental health. He interviewed nineteen people from across the world about what it's like to turn to generative AI for emotional support and healing, and analyzed the themes and implications. The study was published here in the Nature partner journal for mental health research, with themes available here to explore and drill down. -

Keris Myrick, MS, MBA
Ms. Myrick is a leading mental health advocate and executive, known for her innovative and inclusive approach to mental health and substance use reform and the public disclosure of her personal story. Ms. Myrick is the developer and host of the podcast Unapologetically Black Unicorns, which focuses on mental health, race equity, and lived experience. She is an in-demand national trainer and keynote speaker and has authored several peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on the peer workforce, inclusion of lived experience, and digital therapeutics in mental health. She is Vice President of Partnerships at Inseparable and serves as a clinical advisor for the Digital Psychiatry program at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Ms. Myrick has over 20 years of experience in innovations, transformation, and peer workforce development in mental health services and has been addressing race equity throughout her career at the local, state, federal, and national levels.
Recent SODP Resources
SODP Newsletters
June, 2025
March, 2025
December, 2025
September, 2025
American Psychiatric Association 2025
Additional Opportunities
Independent Medical Education Program
Clinical App Integration
This Independent Medical Education Program is made possible by the support of Boehringer Ingelheim. It seeks to equip mental health care providers (or anyone interested) with the knowledge and tools to meaningfully integrate mental health applications into their clinical workflow through up-to-date, evidence-based digital medical education. We aim to leverage the abundance of mobile applications to help address current treatment gaps and improve patient outcomes in schizophrenia care and mental healthcare at large.