SEPI Research Committee

Dr. Podina is a licensed clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, certified by the Albert Ellis Institute, New York. She is currently the head of the Cognitive Clinical Sciences Laboratory from UB and a Ph.D. supervisor at the same institution. Her main research interests target the development of scientifically based e-Health interventions for behavior change, the investigation of clinical effectiveness moderators and mechanisms of change in psychotherapy. She also has a keen interest in bridging the fundamental research-practice gap. In concert with these interests, Dr. Podina was recently the PI of a research project focused on using e-health psychotherapy to treat emotional eating problems in adults at risk for obesity (PNII-RU-TE-2014-4-2481, ‘SIGMA: A Self-help, Integrated, and Gamified Mobile-phone Application for weight management in young adults). Currently, she is the PI of a project aiming to use natural language processing to identify psychopathology markers in the written language of cancer survivors (PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-2140 - „ The aiCARE project - An Artificial Intelligence-powered Conversational therapeutic Agent for Anxiety and Depression in young adult cancer survivors_. Dr. Podina uses in her research meta-analytic methods, multilevel longitudinal models, and ecological momentary assessment. She joined SEPI as a regular member and later on as a research committee member.