World Voice Day, April 16th, 2025

To commemorate World Voice Day 2025, SHBT is spotlighting a student and his two advisors. 

Rahul Brito is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Harvard Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience Technology. His dissertation advisors are Dr. Satrajit Ghosh, who leads the Senseable Intelligence Group at the McGovern Institute at MIT, and Dr. Einat Liebenthal, who leads the Laboratory for Functional Neuroimaging and Bioinformatics at McLean Hospital at Harvard Medical School.

Rahul, Satra, and Einat study how the human voice changes due to mental health disorders such as depression in order to enable accessible and affordable screening, diagnosis, and treatment. Decreases in speaking rate or increases in flatness of pitch have been shown to occur in patients with severe depression. However, this technology has not been clinically adopted because it has not yet been shown to generalize to the larger population for reasons that are not fully understood.

For his dissertation work, Rahul seeks to understand what changes in the voice are specific to an individual’s depression. Many individuals with depression have diagnoses of other disorders which also affect the voice, from anxiety and ADHD, to Parkinson’s disease and aphasia. Rahul is working with the Bridge2AI Voice dataset, an NIH-funded dataset which has voice samples from patients who have many of the disorders that affect voice, and building machine learning models to tease apart the changes in voice due to a patient’s depression versus their other diagnosis. This is critical to connecting patients to the right treatment for their specific situation, and these models will help advance this technology beyond the lab to the clinic.