Affiliation: University of Bucharest, Romania
Keywords: Digital health, mental health, computational linguistics, cognitive clinical sciences, cancer survivorship
Full profile: Ioana Podina is a professor of psychology at the University of Bucharest and the founder of the Laboratory of Cognitive Clinical Sciences. Her academic expertise spans clinical and cognitive psychology, with a focus on digital mental health, psychotherapy, and cancer survivorship research. Ioana’s interdisciplinary approach also incorporates human-computer interaction and computational linguistics, resulting in impactful, evidence-based research published in top-tier journals.
Actively engaged in shaping science policy, she serves on Romania’s Consultative College for Research, Development, and Innovation and recently held the position of Vice Chair of UNESCO’s expert group on the ethics of neurotechnologies. In these roles, she has demonstrated a strong commitment to the ethical governance of emerging technologies.
Ioana also serves as Chair of the Research Committee for the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI) and as a country representative for the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR). Her projects, such as aiCARE, exemplify her ability to integrate expertise from psychology, IT, and computational linguistics to develop innovative solutions, including chatbots, to address mental health issues for cancer survivors and broader public health challenges.
A passionate advocate for evidence-based science communication, she uses social media campaigns to combat pseudoscience and engage the public, fostering greater trust in science and mental health research.