I am a third-year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University, advised by Erik Nook in the Logic of Emotion Lab.
My research sits at the intersection of computer science, natural language processing, and clinical psychology. My program of research seeks to develop and evaluate language-based tools for mental health assessment, with a focus on the psychometric validity and generalizability of such tools.
My current work examines whether large language models predict depression and anxiety equivalently across racially and ethnically diverse samples, how the semantic content of first-person pronoun use in psychotherapy transcripts tracks symptom severity and treatment response, and whether we can develop domain-adapted clinical language models to reliably predict treatment outcomes.
Prior to Princeton, I was as a Lab Manager in Emily Falk’s Communication Neuroscience Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. I have also had the privilege of collaborating with researchers including Jamie Pennebaker and people affiliated with the World Well-Being Project at the University of Pennsylvania.
My research has been supported by the Princeton University Data Driven Social Science Graduate Fellowship, the New Jersey Health Foundation, and Princeton Precision Health.
Selected Publications
Mesquiti, S., Stade E. C., Hull, T.D., Nook, E. C. (Submitted). The Meaning of “I”: Semantic Self-Representation Tracks Internalizing Symptoms Within and Across Persons in Psychotherapy. DOI
Mesquiti, S. & Nook, E.C. (2026). Large Language Models in Mental Health Treatment and Research. Annual Reviews BioMedical Data Science. DOI
Mesquiti, S., Cosme, D., Nook, E.C., Falk E.B., Burns S. (2026). Predicting Psychological and Subjective Well-being through Language-based Assessments of Well-being. Communications Psychology. DOI
A complete list of publications is available on Google Scholar and in my CV.
Research Interests
- Development of language-based clinical assessmenrs
- Language as a transdiagnostic index of psychological distress
- Domain adaptation and evaluation of large language models for mental health
- Computational psycholinguistics and large-scale text analysis
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 |