ABOUT

In a few words:

Hi, I am Amit.

I am a tenured professor, social-tech entrepreneur, and clinical psychologist. My work moves between academia and technology, with one recurring interest: how to build technologies that genuinely help people.

I believe that each and every one of us can make the world a better place, even if it sometimes feels a bit pretentious or naive.

A few things I have built and contributed:

Developed Enlight, an evaluation framework shown to predict real-world engagement with digital interventions and the outcomes people achieve.
Developed Benevolent Parenting, a digital parent-training program for child disruptive behaviors that is freely available for adaptation through the Open Science Framework.
Led a randomized trial showing that stronger therapeutic design, based on my conceptualization, increased program completion from 27.9% to 68.9% and improved clinical outcomes. This work received the 2024 Digital Innovation Award from the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.
Introduced concepts and models for digital interventions, including therapeutic persuasiveness, digital micro-intervention care, and effort-optimized interventions.
Published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, including the most cited paper on objective user engagement with mental health apps.
Created freely available programs for parents and volunteers that have assisted hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.
Co-founded and chair MindTools.io, a public e-health clearinghouse that has reached more than 300,000 unique users.
Collaborate on Finland’s national implementation of digital parent training, which serves more than 2,000 families annually.
Served on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions and as an Associate Editor of journals in digital mental health.
Worked extensively in technology, co-founding startups, leading product and data-research work, advising technology companies, and working with venture capital firms during due diligence to evaluate digital health companies.

In a few paragraphs

I am a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Haifa (currently on academic leave) where I founded the Digital Interventions Psychology Lab. I am also an Associate Professor at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, Northwell Health, in New York. I am a licensed psychologist in New York and Israel.

My academic work focuses on understanding how digital technologies can genuinely help people change. I study how the quality and architecture of digital interventions affect engagement and outcomes, how people’s needs and circumstances shape the kinds of support they use, and how technology can extend the ability of parents, volunteers, clinicians, and others to help the people around them.

I have served on the board of directors of the International Society for Research on Internet Interventions, as a scientific editor of a journal in the field, and as a member of the founding committee of the First International Congress for Parental Support.

A recurring part of my work has been to turn ideas into things that can actually be used. Beyond Enlight and Benevolent Parenting, I upgraded an open-source platform that enables researchers without programming expertise to build sophisticated digital interventions, and I have made intervention resources openly available for others to use and develop further.

My first encounter with the high-tech world was around 2006, and the beginning was quite accidental. An entrepreneur asked me to help understand user behavior on his company’s website, and I discovered that what I knew about psychology, statistics, and human behavior could be useful well beyond academia. Since then, I have consulted technology companies on product and analytics, co-founded startups, served in product and data-research leadership roles, and evaluated digital health companies for venture capital firms during due diligence.

Today, my work continues to move between these worlds. I recently co-founded a startup using AI to create therapeutic experiences, currently in stealth, and I am writing my book, Man’s Search for Relevance.

You can read more about these works on my laboratory website.

Want to work with me? If you’re interested in a workshop for your team, see Psychological Product Architecture in the Age of AI or Mental Health Ambassadors. If you’d like to invite me for a keynote, you can read about Man’s Search for Relevance or Philosophize Your Company.