Subigya Nepal is a TYDE Faculty Affiliate and serves on the TYDE Interdisciplinary Training Committee.
He is an experimental computer scientist who studies mental health through the lens of everyday technology. He collects data from smartphones and wearables to understand how people actually behave in the wild, then builds AI systems that can predict mental health challenges and deliver just-in-time adaptive interventions at precisely the right moment. His work combines large language models with behavioral sensing to create personalized support systems that meet students where they are. He conducted a groundbreaking five-year longitudinal study tracking over 200 college students, the longest continuous mobile sensing study to date, capturing how they navigated everything from daily stressors to the chaos of COVID-19.
Dr. Nepal is particularly excited about using generative AI to revolutionize student mental health support. His recent work integrates LLMs with passive sensing to create AI-powered interventions that deliver personalized support based on students’ actual behavior patterns like sleep, activity, and social interactions. He’s explored first-generation students navigating college transitions and developed context-aware systems that know when to intervene.
Before joining UVA, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Dartmouth College in 2024.