Name, department, year
Subigya Nepal, Computer Science, Faculty member since Fall 2025
Hometown
Kathmandu, Nepal
How are you connected to TYDE?
I’m a TYDE Faculty Affiliate and sit on the Interdisciplinary Training Committee. My research sits right at the intersection of technology and youth mental health, so TYDE felt like a natural home. I love that it brings together people from such different fields — psychologists, educators, clinicians, computer scientists — all trying to tackle the same hard problems from different angles.
What is your research about? What parts of it are the most exciting to you?
My research is basically about teaching your phone to understand you. I use smartphone and wearable data to capture how people behave in real life, then build AI systems that can make sense of it all. For example, we ran a five-year study with 200+ college students that tracked them through everything from finals week to COVID. What excites me most right now is using Generative AI to build tools that don’t just flag when someone is struggling but actually help people learn about themselves and perform at their best.
What do you wish people knew about youth mental health and digital technology?
That the goal shouldn’t just be harm reduction. There’s a tendency to frame this whole conversation around what technology is doing to young people, but I think the more interesting question is what technology could do for them. Done well, these tools can help young people understand their own patterns, build better habits and thrive in ways that weren’t possible before. That framing gets lost when the conversation defaults to fear.
If you were the U.S. digital technology czar, what kinds of policies would you recommend to help young people thrive?
A few things. I’d require platforms to give users, especially young people, meaningful control over their own data and how algorithms are shaping what they see. I’d push digital literacy into school curricula the same way we treat math or science, because understanding how these systems work should be considered basic education at this point. And I’d create real incentives for platforms to optimize for user growth and wellbeing rather than just engagement. The metrics companies chase shape everything they build, so changing those metrics is probably the highest leverage thing you could do.
