CBITs Welcomes New 2026 Postdoctoral Fellows to Advance Digital Mental Health Research
By Becca Flynn – February 5, 2026
The Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies (CBITs) welcomes two new postdoctoral fellows, Dylan Thomas Doyle, PhD and Maya Hareli, PhD to its “Multidisciplinary Training Program in Digital Mental Health.” This NIMH-supported T32 fellowship program, now in its eighth year, is a central focus of the center and supports its mission of training the next generation of leaders in digital mental health. Through this program, CBITs provides early-career scholars training and opportunities to work with leading researchers in both psychological science and human-computer interaction (HCI), as they prepare for careers in academia and beyond improving mental health outcomes through innovative technologies.
Meet Dylan Thomas Doyle, PhD
Doyle comes to CBITs with unique experience, as a human-computer interaction researcher with a PhD in information science and a background in sociology and religious studies. “I was drawn to CBITs because of its interdisciplinary research opportunities and diverse faculty,” Doyle says.
An interdisciplinary researcher himself, Doyle’s research centers on designing technology that compassionately supports people during medical and mental health crises, with a particular focus on digital legacy, grief, and emerging technologies like AI. Over the past year, Doyle served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder and as the inaugural research fellow at the Peerbots non-profit, where he explored ethical implications of humanoid robot design.
At CBITs, Doyle plans to continue his work on “generative ghosts,” AI-generated imitations of deceased individuals trained on personal data, for individuals managing grief. He will also collaborate with faculty mentors Andrew Berry, PhD and Jonah Meyerhoff, PhD on projects centered on values-based design and AI chatbot safety, respectively. Doyle’s long-term career goal is to document how people experience emerging technology and develop ethical, compassionate tools, whether in academia, industry, or the non-profit sector. Outside of research, Doyle is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and a board-certified hospital chaplain.
Meet Maya Hareli, PhD
Hareli joins CBITs with training in clinical psychology and a research focus on digital mental health interventions (DMHIs). Drawn to CBITs by its work on human support in digital mental health, Hareli says that CBITs’ research “integrally shaped my own research questions throughout graduate school,” and that the opportunity to learn from and contribute to this work was a strong motivator for joining the center.
Hareli’s research focuses on developing and evaluating interventions to support youth and young adult mental health, with a particular focus on defining key factors that promote lasting, meaningful change. During her doctoral training, she worked on several projects that helped identify facilitators for positive intervention outcomes, including engagement and peer support. This work, in addition to a growing interest in using technology to expand access to evidence-based care, led Hareli to focus on how digital mental health tools can increase intervention reach and engagement and improve outcomes, especially among under-resourced and minoritized communities.
Over the past several years, Hareli has contributed to multiple multi-year projects examining the role of support features in DMHIs. In collaboration with researchers at UMass Boston, Hareli helped design and implement a pilot study using supportive accountability to improve adherence to a novel mental health smartphone application (MentorPro) among racially diverse youth in national mentoring programs. More recently, Maya’s dissertation evaluated a technology-enhanced peer mentoring program for at-risk first-year college students, highlighting the acceptability of a stepped-care approach that combines paraprofessional support with digital tools.
At CBITs, Hareli plans to launch the development and testing of a digital tool to support an ADHD engagement intervention, with the goal of increasing access and engagement in ADHD care. This work will be mentored by Kaylee Kruzan, PhD at CBITs and Andrea Spencer, MD at Lurie Children’s Hospital. Hareli’s long-term goal is to build a dynamic clinical research career focused on DMHIs, evidence-based treatments for youth and young adults, design, mentorship, and collaboration. Outside of research, Hareli enjoys Latin dancing.
Director of the training program, David Mohr, PhD shared that he is “especially excited about Dylan and Maya joining the CBITs fellowship, as they embody the multidisciplinary vision of our training program.” Highlighting the fellowship’s mentor-driven model, he added that, “our multidisciplinary faculty will be able to provide them with the full spectrum of training, spanning behavioral science and HCI theory and methodology, allowing them to develop shared language and a collaborative approach to digital mental health research.”
While recruitment is now closed for 2026-2027 postdoctoral applications, applications for the 2027-2028 year will open in September 2026. Those interested in the philosophy of the program can visit the CBITs postdoctoral fellowship webpage for more information.