Leily Behbehani
Leily is a clinical psychology PhD student at Yale, where she works in Dr. Shirley Wang's lab developing computational methods that bring context into real-time models of self-injurious thoughts and behaviors and related maladaptive coping. Her research integrates natural language processing, large language models, and ecological momentary assessment to capture the contextual factors that shift a person's risk from one day to the next. She built a two-stage topic modeling pipeline that combines unsupervised clustering with LLM-based recategorization to map what people are actually thinking at each level of commonly used suicide-risk severity ratings. She has also developed an R Shiny dashboard that returns personalized visual feedback to study participants, treating them as collaborators rather than passive data sources. She plans to pursue an academic research career at the intersection of clinical psychology and data science.
What do you do with Data Science?
I'm excited to develop formal grounding in the data science methods I've been piecing together on my own, and to do it alongside researchers wrestling with the same questions from other fields.