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🧠 Philip Sittinger: "I treat AI like cars: benchmarks are horsepower—impressive, but not safety. In sensitive contexts (including mental health), I crash-test models with different techniques to see where bias shows up and who gets harmed." #AI #Fairness

Today, Johan Sittinger is sharing one of his biggest learnings about #academia: Good research is mostly iteration, not “genius moments.” It’s debugging, rethinking assumptions, failing, narrowing scope, and trying again.

@uab.cat @pruab.cat @psicologiauab.bsky.social

Meet Philipp Sittinger, our next PhD candidate featured in TOUCH! With a BSc & MSc in Psychology, he’s now doing a PhD in Computer Science at the CVC, building explainable AI to evaluate large language datasets and audit bias in mental-health related user detection. @psicologiauab.bsky.social

🤝Let's meet Francesca Railneau, our next PhD student at TOUCH!

🧠Hi, I’m a psychotherapist and researcher whose work focuses on participatory research: involving MH service users as collaborators.

🎓For my PhD, I explore how co-creating research can make science meaningful, ethical, and impactful.

My research is driven by lived experience. ⏳
I believe research should evolve with life, shaping how we grow—not just what we know.

📚 At the heart of my research on older adults is a simple idea: fulfillment isn’t limited to youth.
Flourishing is possible at every stage of life. 🌻

❎ Myth: Aging is something to fear, resist, or reverse.

✅ What my research shows: Aging is a meaningful, developmental life process—not just a medical one.
Healthy aging isn’t something we start at retirement; it’s shaped by how we live across the entire lifespan.

Did you know? 🤔

Helping older adults revisit and share meaningful life memories can boost their life satisfaction and overall well-being.

🧠 Reminiscence therapy is emerging as a simple, drug-free way to promote healthy psychological aging in communities.  @uab.cat

🚀 Today we're introducing Sneha Ouseph, a TOUCH PhD candidate: a psychologist from India exploring flourishing and self-compassion, now focused on healthy aging. Her PhD compares older adults’ lived experiences in India and Spain, plus experts’ views on modifiable psychosocial risks to QoL. @uab.cat

Why #decolonial research? 🤔 Because it asks who defines knowledge and whose realities are silenced, making colonial power relations visible instead of neutral. It shifts us from studying people as objects to working with them, valuing situated and community knowledges. @uab.cat @uchile.bsky.social

Meet Pamela Merrill, PhD candidate in TOUCH. Psychologist from Chile with an Erasmus Mundus joint MA in literature & gender studies. 🤩 Her research explores fiction, monstrous and self narratives to rethink mental health, desire & subjectivity in higher education. @uab.cat

Whats's an unexpected difficulty Firaol has encountered? Let's hear it! ⬇️

As an Ethiopian studying in Spain, an unexpected difficulty: learning Catalan and Castellano at the same time. People switch between them in a single conversation and sometimes I have no idea which is which😂 @uab.cat

It's neither a moral failure nor a permanent condition.

There are DOZENS of effective next-step treatments: tDCS, TMS, ketamine/esketamine, ECT, augmentation strategies, etc. Many of them go into full remission after being labeled “treatment resistant.”👏

#TreatmentResistantDepression #MentalHealth

🤔 The most common misconception about treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is that it is an untreatable condition.

🧠 TRD is a failure to respond to at least two adequate antidepressant trials regardless of optimal dosing and adherence. This occurs in approximately 20% to 50% of individuals... ⬇️

🐍 A core tool in my PhD: #Python. With Python, we can do almost everything. From programming experiments and running statistical analyses to creating beautiful visualisations and implementing AI models.
Learning it in advance was a real game changer for my PhD journey.

Discovering #MultimodalIntegration: In mental health research, data comes from neural signals, physiological responses, behaviour,... Tomás' goal is to combine them using ML models that capture how these interact. 🤯 It’s like building a map of the mind that connects biology, experience, and emotion.

✨Meet Tomás D’Amelio, a PhD candidate in the TOUCH Programme!
He’s building predictive models that integrate multimodal data to understand cognitive & affective dynamics.
His work connects neuroscience, emotions, and AI. He explores how machine learning can reveal patterns behind health & behaviour.

Today, Agenese asks us something she'd love to know:

I'd love to ask to society is "what would our world look like if #inclusion were not a policy, but a feeling that every person, regardless of origin 🌍, could carry within themselves"? ❤️

webs.uab.cat/touch/

My biggest surprise in academia? 🤯
How much it changes across countries 🌍.

Moving from one place to another and building many international relationships 🤝, I realised that “academia” can carry very different meanings depending on where you experience it ✨.

👩‍🎓 Meet Agnese Capurri, featured in TOUCH! She’s an Italian sociologist doing her PhD at @uab.cat (GRAFO), exploring migrants’ mental health.

Her research focuses on the wellbeing of Pakistani mothers and daughters in Barcelona. 🌍💬

@florbathory.bsky.social: The best advice I've ever received came from a friend who told me to be as generous with others as I would have liked others to be with me. That's the way to do science. If we care about knowledge, being generous and collaborative with our colleagues is the path to follow 🫂

@florbathory.bsky.social: Interdisciplinarity is a challenge and an opportunity when approaching mental health among midlife & older population from Demography. I couldn't make proper research without other research from disciplines like Psychiatry, Psychologists, Epidemiology or Sociology. 🤩

My research could help policy-makers understand the struggles at older ages with mental health issues and how it affects people around them. This could improve medical attention for the older population and care-policy strategies to avoid the pressure on the "sandwich generations", especially women.

A key concept in my research is the "cumulative (dis)advantage hypothesis" in #mentalhealth trajectories. 🤔 Initial advantages or disadvantages accumulate over time, widening gaps. Variables like education, income, social support,... influence coping and health, key to understanding depression.

We're so glad to have you with us! 🚀

👩‍🎓 Meet Florencia Bathory — our next PhD student we’re introducing in TOUCH.
She’s an Argentinian sociologist doing her doctorate in Demography at CED-UAB. Her thesis looks at mental health status of older people living with chronic conditions, and the ways this relationship can develop.

📖 Worth reading in EJIR (2025): Cross-national relationships between employment quality and mental well-being. The study shows how collective bargaining can reduce mental health inequalities at work. It helps us rethink labour and wellbeing.

https://shorturl.at/xni5r
#TOUCHProgramme

❓Did you know that across the OECD, care workers are more exposed to #mentalhealth risks than other employees — often working under time pressure and dealing with difficult situations with patients. This challenge is key to understanding the links between work, care, and mental health. @uab.cat

Why does my research matter? The care sector is at the heart of today’s social care crisis. By studying precarious work and mental health, I aim to shed light on how power relations shape workers’ wellbeing and the future of care.

#CareWork #PhD #MentalHealth #TOUCHProgramme

What is Francisca's motivation to tackle a PhD programme? To understand the internal dynamics of the care sector — central to sustaining life, yet paradoxically undervalued and marked by poor mental health conditions despite its enormous social value.

#CareWork #PhD #MentalHealth #TOUCHProgramme

❓Did you know: Care workers in Barcelona face high levels of depersonalization — an emotional defense that creates distance from patients and from themselves.

This challenge is key to understanding the links between work, care, and mental health.

#CareWork #TOUCHProgramme #MentalHealth #PhD