Alex Leow

A rare physician-mathematician, Alex Leow is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and cofounder of the Collaborative Neuroimaging Environment for Connectomics (CoNECt) (brain.uic.edu), an inter-departmental research team devoted to the study of the human brain using many multidisciplinary approaches. She is the lead of the award- winning BiAffect study (first prize, the Mood Challenge for ResearchKit. BiAffect is the first scientific study that seeks to turn smartphones into “brain fitness trackers”, by unobtrusively inferring neuropsychological functioning using passively-collected keystroke dynamics and kinematics metadata (i.e., not what you type but how you type it). The BiAffect team was the first to publish scientific studies that demonstrated the feasibility of leveraging keystroke dynamics and kinematics, and the BiAffect study iOS app now powers the first-ever crowd- sourced research study to unobtrusively measure mood and cognition in real-time in Bipolar Disorder using iPhones. The study app is publicly available on the App Store and as of July 2018 more than 5500 hours of typing dynamics have been recorded.