The Illinois Psychiatric Society (IPS) held its annual meeting on Saturday, October 3, 2026, at the William Tell Hotel in Countryside, Illinois.

Centered on the theme “The Elephant in the Waiting Room: Confronting Today’s Psychiatric Challenges,” the event brought together psychiatric professionals, trainees, and experts from across Illinois to explore emerging issues in mental health care.

A featured highlight was Dr. Ajilore, who presented “ELIZA for the 21st Century: Promise and Perils of AI in Psychiatric Practice.” His presentation focused on the opportunities and challenges associated with artificial intelligence in psychiatric practice, reflecting the growing importance of technology in mental health care.

Through its educational presentations, research showcase, and professional networking opportunities, the IPS Annual Meeting provided a forum to examine current psychiatric challenges and discuss the evolving future of mental health care!

We are so excited for Aksu Gunay to present her thesis defense, “From Blood to Brain: A Gsα Biomarker Linking Depression, Psychedelics and Brain Network Architecture.” Please come out to support her!

Thesis Advisors: Olusola Ajilore, MD, PhD, Mark M. Rasenick, PhD

Time/Date: Thursday, August 27, 2026, 3:00 pm

Location: COMRB 1020 (Moss Auditorium)

Zoom Link: https://uic.zoom.us/j/82234464996?pwd=b0vXE4ASl28iN9jYrlHbTweMAIYbWA.1

More info here

Dr. Alex Leow will be presenting at this year’s TEDxCHICAGO on September 23rd!

Dr. Ajilore was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune about the impact of COVID-19 on African Americans:

Dr. Leow and BiAffect featured in an article on AI and psychiatry in IEEE Pulse

The CoNeCT Lab had great respresentation at this year’s UIC Psychiatry Research Extravaganza with 10 (!) posters. Guests of the extravaganza were treated with excellent music courtesy of CoNeCT lab co-director, Dr. Alex Leow!

Dr. Ajilore discusses the CoNeCT lab project BiAffect as part of the newly formed Digital Mental Health Initiative at UIC

It’s been a busy May for the CoNECt lab. The lab had strong showing at this year’s annual meeting of the Society of Biological Psychiatry in our hometown of Chicago. At the meeting, our first results from the BiAffect study were presented by grad student John Bark and the lab’s work was featured in a plenary session by Dr. Olu Ajilore. Dr. Alex Leow closed out the meeting with an excellent presentation on using BiAffect to detect psychomotor disturbances in mood disorders. Grad student Paul Thomas presented his exciting work using machine learning to identify key brain regions in a transdiagnositic RDoC study at the IEEE Biomedical Health Informatics meeting.

In this talk Dr. Leow will share her reflections, as both a computational researcher and a practicing psychiatrist, on the current landscape of psychiatric neuroimaging research and where we go from here.  Link

Dr. Olu Ajilore will be presenting work using dynamic connectome analyses to understand the neural correlates of rumination at the annual meeting of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America in Chicago.

Wonderful write-up on BiAffect from this weekend’s Wall Street Journal:

Dr. Alex Leow will be at participating in the Digital Health Coalition MIdwest Summit at Takeda. This networking event features industry leaders and experts from Takeda, Abbvie, Google and Astellas.

See more here:

http://digitalhealthcoalition.org/events/dhc-midwest-summit-2018/

We thank Dean Pete Nelson for allowing us to present DiaBetty to the distinguished Advisory Board. It was a great opportunity to showcase our developing technology to assist patients with diabetes self-management using our voice-first, mood-sensitive platform. Photo Credit: Dr. Alex Leow!

Dr. Leow will be presenting our work with BiAffect as part of a panel and networking event on applied AI in healthcare. See the link for more details.

Dr. Ajilore will be part of the panel "The Future of Diabetes Education - "Live" Educator and "Virtual" Coach Partners in Care" at this year's American Diabetes Association meeting in Orlando, Florida. He will be presenting DiaBetty, an Alexa-enabled virtual diabetes coach that is sensitive to the user's mood state.

Dr. Leow will presenting our latest method for analyzing the intrinsic topology of functional connectomes, PhASE. For more info, see here.

Bonjour! CoNECt lab collaborators Ouri Wolfson and Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci will be presenting joint work from the lab on Massive Hierarchical Parcellations and Latent Geometry Network Markers Neuroscience and Precision Medicine at this year's Network Neuroscience satellite meeting in Paris, France.

BiAffect was chosen by NIH to be presented at the 2018 mHealth Technology Showcase on June 4, 2018.  We're excited to demonstrate BiAffect as an open science research tool to improve the reliability and validity of passive sensing using keyboard metadata.

We are looking for post-doctoral fellows interested in computational psychiatry, connectomics, machine learning, neuroimaging. This 1-2 year fellowship is funded by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Click on "Contact Us" if you are interested!

BiAffect, our passive mood-tracking app for the iPhone is now available in the App Store. If you have an iPhone, this is your opportunity to participate in the first-ever, crowdsourced mood study for the Apple's ResearchKit.