Dear Staff, Fellows, Residents, and Colleagues,
As you will recall, in 2024 the UBC Department of Psychiatry, in partnership with the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health (DMCBH), created a new academic faculty position in the area of Data Science. Now that the selection process and appointment for this position have been completed, I am delighted to announce that Dr. Hao-Ting Wang is the successful candidate.
She will begin her full-time tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant Professor as of May 1, 2026.
Dr. Wang completed her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging at the University of York, UK, followed by postdoctoral positions at the University of York, the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, and CRIUGM in Montréal, where she worked with Professor Lune Bellec on neuroimaging software and neurodegenerative biomarker discovery. She is a core developer of Nilearn, a widely used open-source Python library for machine learning in neuroimaging, and recipient of the 2023 Neuro–Irv and Helga Cooper Open Science Prize.
Dr. Wang’s research program sits at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and transdiagnostic psychiatry. She studies brain function during naturalistic experiences — such as films, video games, and everyday tasks — that engage continuous, real-world cognition, pairing these paradigms with experience sampling to anchor brain activity to what people are actually thinking and feeling in the moment. Rather than treating psychiatric conditions as categorically distinct, she seeks shared neurocognitive mechanisms measurable at population scale. A core commitment of her research is open and reproducible science, and she aims to develop brain decoding approaches to evaluate and interpret fMRI-based AI models, producing evaluation frameworks for the broader research community. The Department is confident that her expertise, combined with the resources of the DMCBH, will position her well to build a distinctive and impactful independent research program at UBC.
Please join me in warmly congratulating Dr. Wang and welcoming her to her new academic appointment in the Department!
Sincerely,
Dr. Lakshmi N. Yatham
MBBS, FRCPC, MRCPsych (UK), MBA (Exec)
Professor and Head, UBC Department of Psychiatry
Director, Institute of Mental Health, UBC
Regional Head and Program Medical Director, VCH/PHC
The UBC Department of Psychiatry Administration Office at the UBC Vancouver Campus respectfully acknowledges the land on which we live and work is the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-waututh).