Aditya Nair

Aditya Nair is the Nanyang Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and AI at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, NTU Singapore, and is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, A*STAR. His research examines how brains and machines process affect and emotion to ultimately deepen our understanding of mental health disorders. His discoveries, which use AI to unravel the mechanisms by which emotions persist and escalate, have been recognized through numerous awards, including the Science Prize for AI-Accelerated Research from AAAS, the NIH NeuroAI Early Career Award and the Gruber International Research Prize from the Society for Neuroscience.

AI2050 Project

Nair’s project aims to build a new kind of AI that can uncover the brain mechanisms underlying emotion, rather than simply labeling behavior as anxious, depressed, or afraid. By combining brain data from mice and humans, they will train AI models to identify shared patterns of neural activity that govern emotional persistence and maladaptive states. The long-term goal is to move mental-health AI beyond prediction toward mechanism: explaining why a person gets stuck in a harmful state, and generating precise treatment hypotheses. If successful, this work could help lay the groundwork for more beneficial AI and for personalized, mechanism-guided psychiatry.