Keynote by Dr. Ging-Jehli on Adaptability in the Digital Age: From Neuroscience to Next-Generation Agentic AI and Health Ecosystems, 7 October 2025
Tuesday, 07 October 2025, 4.15 pm CET, Hybrid
About Nadja Ging-Jehli
Dr. Nadja Ging-Jehli is a neuroscientist and economist studying how people and machines adapt in uncertain and constantly changing environments. Bridging neuroscience with mathematical psychology, computational psychiatry, and agentic artificial intelligence, she develops new ways to examine and strengthen adaptive behavior across both scientific and applied settings. She places special emphasis on understanding individual differences in the mechanisms that guide when we persist, let go, or change strategy, asking why some individuals remain flexible under pressure while others get stuck.
By clarifying how adaptability breaks down and recovers, her work aims to advance precision psychiatry, resilience, and the design of AI systems that can flexibly respond to real-world uncertainty.
A central focus is meta-learning (how we reflect on, reconfigure, and improve our own strategies) which offers insights into psychiatric rigidity and provides design principles for more self-reflective AI. To advance this vision, Dr. Ging-Jehli created the Gearshift Fellowship, a neurocomputational game platform for studying, assessing, and training human-AI adaptability.
About the Lecture
In today’s fast-changing world, success depends on a single capacity: knowing when to persist, when to let go, and when to shift gears. Adaptability is one of our most vital assets. When it falters, the consequences are tangible: greater vulnerability to stress, cycles of anxiety or emotional instability, and losses in productivity. Digital health innovations and therapeutic tools have made important progress in supporting mental health. Yet many still target single aspects of functioning, such as tracking mood or reducing stress. By doing so, they overlook how mental states fluctuate from moment to moment and how difficulties often reinforce one another. This makes it harder to detect when someone is entering a vulnerable state, and even harder to intervene at the right moment with the right support.
In this talk, I will share what research from behavioral economics, neuroscience, and computational psychiatry reveals about the drivers of adaptability. Drawing on recent studies, I will show how various mental health conditions can bias decision-making and reinforce rigid patterns in thinking and behavior that undermine adaptability. I will then introduce the Gearshift Fellowship (GF), a next-generation serious-game environment that translates these insights into practice. GF captures how people adapt in real time and is being developed to transform these measurements into adaptive training. Its aim is to help individuals harness emotions as resources, navigate uncertainty with confidence, and build skills that support well-being and productivity. GF also serves as a testbed for developing agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems that learn to adapt alongside humans and co-evolve with them.
Finally, I will share a vision for how GF, together with other digital health platforms, can contribute to a new ecosystem at the intersection of neuroscience, digital health, and agentic AI. This ecosystem will drive mechanism-based discovery for science and adaptive tools for clinicians, educators, insurers, and innovators to promote mental well-being and performance at scale.
We are pleased to invite you to join this guest lecture, which is part of our CDHI Lecture Series Digital Health Forum. Registration is not required. Please be aware that we will be recording this guest lecture and will be making it available in our teaching library. If you have any questions, please contact Victoria Brügger (victoria.bruegger@unisg.ch) prior to the start of the guest lecture.
Prof. Dr. Tobias Kowatsch, Associate Professor for Digital Health Interventions, Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care, University of Zurich; Director, School of Medicine, University of St.Gallen (HSG); Scientific Director, Centre for Digital Health Interventions (CDHI), ETH Zurich & HSG; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore
Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch, Professor of Information Management, ETH Zürich; Professor of Technology Management, University of St.Gallen; Advisory Board Member, CDHI, ETH Zürich & University of St.Gallen; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore
Prof. Dr. Florian von Wangenheim, Professor of Technology Marketing, ETH Zurich & Advisory Board Member, CDHI; Principal Investigator, Future Health Technologies programme, Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE), Singapore-ETH Centre, Singapore
