Dongju Seo, PhD

Dongju Seo, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, Director of Digital Health and AI at the Yale Stress Center, and Director of the Laboratory for Healthy Minds. As a brain scientist and a licensed clinical psychologist, Dr. Seo's research bridges applied AI, digital health, neuroscience, and mental health intervention.

Her research aims to make mental health care scalable, personalized, and accessible by developing AI-driven tools across the continuum of care—from early detection of stress-related health risks to digital interventions delivered via smartphones, wearables, and telehealth.

As Director of Digital Health and AI at the Yale Stress Center, she develops AI models to build personalized risk signatures for stress-related chronic diseases. This work integrates continuous real-world data—from smartwatches, sweat-based biosensors, and smartphones—with lab-based stress measures and clinical records, leveraging multimodal LLMs.

Dr. Seo is the original developer of Emotion Regulation via Breathing for Alcohol Misuse (EBA), a novel breathing-based digital intervention for stress and addiction-related disorders. She also serves as the contact PI for NIH-funded research evaluating this method to address stress, chronic pain, and opioid misuse.

Her approach is grounded in more than 20 years of neuroscience research on stress, reward learning, and addiction, utilizing multimodal neuroimaging (fMRI combined with ECG, hormonal, and metabolic measures) alongside machine learning methods such as connectome-based predictive modeling. She collaborates closely with colleagues in psychiatry, radiology, and computer science and mentors interdisciplinary trainees working at the intersection of digital mental health and AI.

Dr. Seo received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2008 and completed postdoctoral training in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.