Grace Huckins

After decades of research, we still have almost no idea what is happening in the brains of people who are mentally ill. And while machine learning has created a lot of excitement around the prospect that we could use brain data to diagnose mental illness, it is unclear that such tools would actually help us understand the root causes of disease. My research brings together computational neuroscience and the philosophy of explanation to try to figure out how to build models that can not only figure out who is mentally ill from brain data, but also explain why that person is mentally ill. I think these explanations are critically important, both because they can spark further scientific progress and because they might bring solace to patients who want to understand what is happening in their brains.