Dyuthi Dinesh

I’m Dyuthi Dinesh, a researcher interested in how people form beliefs and make decisions, especially when emotion, social media, and AI are involved.

I’m currently a Research Assistant in Prof. Srikanth Padmala’s Emotion and Cognition Lab at the Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), where I use computational modeling to study how emotion and cognition interact in decision-making. I’m also a Research Associate with the Cognitive Media Lab at UC San Diego and with Haupt Data Analytics & Consulting.

My work so far has followed three threads:

• Misinformation and belief: My honours thesis at UBC examined the individual differences behind COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy beliefs, and my master’s thesis at Columbia profiled social media users based on how they engage with misinformation.
• Emotion, cognition, and decision-making: At IISc, I’m implementing drift diffusion models to evaluate the cognitive mechanisms of decision-making under high and low perceptual load.
• AI and digital mental health: As a Clinical Researcher at Wysa, I studied an AI conversational agent for mental health support, which led to three peer-reviewed papers. More recently, I’ve evaluated LLMs on pharmaceutical tasks and established safety metrics for an LLM-powered mental health tool.

I’m drawn to research that has real social impact: my interests span mental health and digital health, AI safety and evaluation, misinformation, political polarization, social media, gaming, and data bias, particularly at the intersection of social sciences and computational methods.

I work across academia and industry, from lab experiments and peer-reviewed papers to A/B tests, dashboards, and client reports. My toolkit includes experimental design, causal inference, machine learning, NLP, and computational modeling, mainly in Python, R, and SQL.

I have an M.A. in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University, and a B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology from the University of British Columbia.

I’ve been a teaching assistant since undergrad — for psychology and statistics courses at the University of British Columbia, and more recently for Natural Language Processing and Applied Data Science at Columbia University, which I genuinely loved. Teaching has always felt like a natural extension of doing research, and helping students understand and love research (like I do!) has always been a passion of mine.

When I’m not working, I’m usually gaming, playing Dungeons & Dragons, crocheting, or reading. Animals are a big part of my life too! I’ve rescued and cared for quite a few over the years, and the highlight of my life has been caring for my pug, Milo, who also had very strong opinions about social science research.