Faculty Affiliates

Dr. Venkat Bhat, MD MSc FRCPC DABPN is a psychiatrist, clinician-scientist, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto with cross-appointments at Unity Health and University Health Network. He leads the AI for Mental Health (AI-M) Program and serves as Mental Health Community of Practice Lead at T-CAIREM, advancing AI for mental health and at the interface of mental health and medical illness. He directs federally funded, interdisciplinary initiatives that bring stakeholders across Canada together in areas including wellness and resilience in the Canadian Armed Forces, depression, and PTSD, emphasizing the bidirectional relationship between AI and neuroscience and the safe, equitable, and scalable integration of AI into clinical care, education, and research.

Dr. Nihal Haque is the Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO) and a practicing geriatrician at Scarborough Health Network. He is also an Assistant Professor at the Temerty Faculty of Medicine. He works with the TCAIREM education committee as a faculty affiliate on AI in medical education. He has obtained certification in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Healthcare from the Michener Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is actively involved in AI‑driven research and innovation, with ongoing projects that include AI applications in delirium care, AI chatbots for medical resident training and AI assisted discharge summary creation for complex, frail older inpatients. Dr. Haque has also provided strategic guidance to AI start‑ups, advising them on privacy and regulatory pathways, research design, clinical validation and commercialization. He was also part of an interdisciplinary academic team that received federal funding from Canada Health Infoway to develop AI solutions to reduce healthcare worker burnout. He also teaches about practical applications of AI to healthcare executives through the Rotman School at the University of Toronto. He is a currently a fellow in the AMS-Fitzgerald Fellowship in AI & Human-Centred Leadership at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. 

Alex Mariakakis is an Associate Professor in the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science and an Affiliate Scientist at KITE@UHN. He runs the Computational Health and Interaction (CHAI) Lab, which leverages ubiquitous technologies like smartphones and wearables to develop innovative mobile health applications. Many of these applications rely on digital signal processing and machine learning to analyze and visualize sensor data, but his group's research also spans other areas, including novel sensing techniques and human-computer interaction.