Hello, I am Thalia.

I am a second-year PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University, based at Cornell Tech in New York City. I am a researcher in the People-Aware Computing Lab, and I work under the mentorship of Profs. Tanzeem Choudhury, Deborah Estrin, and Nicola Dell.
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I previously worked with Dr. Laura Berner at Mount Sinai's Center for Excellence in Eating and Weight Disorders and Center for Computational Psychiatry, where I studied self-control and emotion regulation in bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder using neuroimaging, neuroendocrine assays, and behavioral paradigmns. By directly working with patients with eating disorders and comorbid conditions (e.g., mood and anxiety disorders and borderline personality disorder), I learned about the limitations and critical gaps in the current approaches for assessing and treating psychiatric disorders.

Motivated by these experiences, I design and evaluate home-based health intervention technologies leveraging wearable sensors and large language models 1) to make evidence-based mental health treatments and interventions more targeted and personalized, and (2) to improve patient/clinician/care partner collaboration. My work also critically examines ethical tensions in digital mental healthcare, including privacy, consent, and agency.  Using mixed-methods approach, I actively collaborate with clinicians, care partners, and patients across age groups to co-create equitable, ethical, and scalable evidence-based solutions.  
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Some key questions that drive my work include:

  • How can passive sensing language models-based intervention systems be designed to dynamically adapt to patients' clinical presentations and evolving needs?
  • How can these technologies balance precision, personalization, and scalability while addressing ethical concerns around privacy, equity, and accessibility in mental healthcare?

Collaborators:

  1. Laura Berner, PhD
  2. Sara Czaja, PhD
  3. Walter Boot, PhD
  4. Andrea Cuadra, PhD


When I am not working on research, I am usually cooking fun/healthy meals, at the gym doing strength training, playing guitar/singing (mostly for my plants), or learning Argentine Tango without kicking anyone :)

Sounds like your thing?

If you are a fellow researcher interested in collaborating or if my work resonates with you, I would be thrilled to connect! Feel free to email me at tv74@cornell.edu or schedule a meeting here.

News

  1. 05/05/2025 - Honored to have been awarded the 2025–2026 Digital Life Initiative (DLI) Doctoral Fellowship at Cornell Tech to support my research at the intersection of technology, ethics, and mental healthcare.
  2. 05/02/2025 - Had a great time participating in the "Designing Technologies for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairments" Workshop, led by my mentors, Drs. Czaja and Boot, at the Center for Research and Education for Aging and Technology Enhancement (CREATE) at Weill Cornell Medicine.
  3. 11/21/2024 - Our BreathePulse paper is officially published! We showed that personalized pulsing airflow from a laptop-mounted fan, synced to an individual’s breathing rate, can help promote slower and deeper breathing during stressful tasks. Learn more about it here!
  4. 10/24/2024 - My co-first-authored work with Tan Gemicioglu and Yiran Zhao on, BreathePulse, the first airflow-based breathing guide, was also accepted to IMWUT for the December 2024 issue!
  5. 10/06/2024 - Work led by Saif, MunchSonic: Tracking Fine-grained Dietary Actions through Active Acoustic Sensing on Eyeglasses, has been published here.
  6. 09/23/2024 - Work led by my mentor, Dan Adler, exploring challenges of generalizing ML-based mental health risk and symptom detection while advocating for “actionable sensing” to improve clinical care, has been accepted to IMWUT (ACM UbiComp Journal) December 2024 issue!
  7. 06/28/2024 - Our paper led by Saif Mahmud on active acoustic sensing for fine-grained eating-related activity detection, MunchSonic, has been accepted to the 2024 International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC). Grateful to Saif for the opportunity to contribute.
  8. 05/20/2024 - My and Yuewen Yang's work on language models and psychotherapy has been presented at CHI 2024 in Hawaii, and can be accessed here.
  9. 05/13/2024 - Our paper on how trust in bodily signals affects emotion regulation and eating behaviors in bulimia nervosa has been published! Read it here.
  10. 04/23/2024 - Our paper on "Evaluating the Predictions of an Interoceptive Inference Model of Bulimia Nervosa" has been accepted for publication in Journal of Eating Disorders! Thank you, Maia Chester, for leading this effort.
  11. 02/29/2024 - My co-first-authored late-breaking work with Yuewen Yang exploring how language models can augment psychotherapy is accepted to CHI 2024!
  12. 08/21/2023 - Starting my PhD in Information Science at Cornell Tech in New York City! I will be working with Prof. Tanzeem Choudhury and her team at the People-Aware Computing lab.
  13. 11/21/2024 - Our qualitative work led by Dan Adler, advocating for more studies on how sensing-based symptom measurement can enhance mental health treatment, is now published! So proud to see Dan leading this effort. Check it out here.