My name is Steven Mesquiti! I’m a second-year PhD Student in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University advised by Erik Nook.
Broadly, I am interested in leveraging natural language processing and artificial intelligence to understand and improve mental health outcomes.
The overarching goal of my research is to develop theoretically-informed, language-based tools that can identify individuals struggling with mental health challenges, predict treatment outcomes, and ensure equitable assessment across diverse populations.
I am particularly interested in examining how the semantic content and structure of language—in everyday communication, social media discourse, and therapeutic conversations—can serve as real-time indices of psychological well-being and distress.
To achieve these goals, my research combines advanced natural language processing techniques, machine learning and computational methods, large-scale text analysis, and psychological theory to extract meaningful insights from language data.
Before Princeton, I worked as a Lab Manager for Emily Falk in the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Along the way, I have worked with excessively generous scientists like Jamie Pennebaker to answer questions at the nexus of Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, and Psychology.
🧠Research Interests
Computational approaches to psychological assessment
Mental health prediction and intervention
Natural language processing and machine learning
Equitable and scalable clinical tools
🎓 Education
| Degree | Field | Year(s) | Institution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ph.D. | Psychology | 2024–Present | Princeton University |
| M.A. | Psychological Research | 2019–2022 | Texas State University |
| B.A. | Psychology (Minor: Spanish) | 2015–2019 | Southwestern University |