We are happy to welcome Dr. Samantha Weber at the Institute for Implementation Science in Health Care (Team Digital Health Interventions), University of Zurich, and the Centre for Digital Health Interventions, where she will support the work on the University Medicine Zurich (UMZH) technology initiative PRECIOUS, a Design and Trial Service for Precision Digital Therapeutics and the UZH Digital Society Initiative ELIAS, an Agentic Interview Service. During her postdoctoral work at the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich, Samantha developed expertise in AI-powered tools for depression assessment, including LLM fine-tuning, chatbot development, and clinical translation, resulting in publications such as:

Weber S., Deperrois N., […], Kowatsch T., Kleim B., Olbrich S. (2025) Using a fine-tuned large language model for symptom-based depression evaluation, npj Digital Medicine 8, 598, 10.1038/s41746-025-01982-8

In addition, Samantha will continue her previous work at the SNF Sinergia project MULTICAST, A MULTIdisCiplinary Approach to prediction and treatment of Suicidality. Supported by close collaboration with the CDHI and Tobias Kowatsch, the project aims to develop digital therapeutics for suicide prevention following hospital discharge.

Samantha holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from ETH Zurich and she then obtained her PhD (Neuroscience) from the University of Bern in 2022. She has been awarded twice for her work on the identification of biopsychosocial markers in psychosomatic disorders. Her broader research vision is to develop and advance responsible and patient-oriented AI systems that complement clinical expertise.