Alex Cohen, Professor

Office: 210A Audubon Hall
Department of Psychology
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
Office Phone: (225)-578-7017
Email: acohen@lsu.edu

View the ASAP webpage.

Dr. Alex Cohen is accepting graduate students for Fall 2025.

Alex Cohen is a licensed clinical psychologist who focuses on understanding and improving the lives of individuals with serious mental illnesses. His work focuses on adapting biobehavioral technologies, notably automated computerized analysis of natural behavior, for assessing a wide range of clinical issues, including suicidality, depression, psychosis, mania and anxiety. His work has been featured in top psychology and psychiatry scientific journals, and he has received funding at the state, federal and international levels. For his efforts, he was recently awarded the 2021 Lewis Opler prize from the International Society for CNS Clinical Trials.

He is currently adjunct at Pennington Biomedical Research Center and LSU Health Sciences, and he maintains a team of 6 doctoral students and 15+ undergraduate research assistants. His former doctoral students have taken positions in academic psychology departments, medical schools, veterans administration and forensic hospitals, and his undergrad RA's have been successful securing masters and doctoral graduate student positions as well as a Fulbright scholarship.

Current Research Projects

Dr. Alex Cohen’s research involves developing digital phenotyping tools. His focus is on integrating complex and voluminous data, notably involving speech, language, facial expression and movement, using multimodal machine learning analytic methods. Particular care is spent ensuring these solutions are meaningfully linked to clinical phenomenon, and are also reliable, valid, culturally sensitive, transparent and explainable.

Dr. Cohen has several public and private sector collaborations meant to accelerate biobehavioral technologies beyond “proof of concept”. Some of these tools are meant to support clinical trials, and others are meant to support clinical decision-making by patients and their treatment teams. He is helping to integrate these tools into several public community mental health systems. Intellectual property from these efforts have been commercialized and licensed to an LSU startup company.

Dr. Cohen is also involved in several international and multidisciplinary consortia. These projects use a variety of “small” and “big” data approaches.

For students interested in participating in this research: Current projects are aimed at better understanding symptoms in individuals with schizophrenia and those at risk for developing psychotic-spectrum disorders. Students can serve a number of duties, including data-coding, computerized analysis of patients’ behavior, literature searches and assisting with data-collection. Responsible students interested in severe mental illness are encouraged to contact Dr. Cohen at acohen@lsu.edu for further information.

Education

2004-2006 Postdoctoral Fellowship University of Maryland, College Park
2004 Ph.D., Clinical Psychology Kent State University
2003-2004 Predoctoral Clinical Internship University of Maryland School of Medicine
1998 B.S., Psychology Portland State University

Teaching

He teaches the following courses:

• Professional Considerations in Psychology (PSYCH 7999)
• Adult Psychopathology (PSYC7962)
• Practicum in Clinical Psychology (PSYC 7688/89)
• Independent Research in Clinical (PSYC 8939/89)
• Abnormal Psychology (PSYC 3082)
• Introduction to Psychology (PSYC 2000)
• Undergraduate Practicum and Research (PSYC 2999/4999)

Representative Publications

 See ASAP website for publications.

Recent Editorship of Special Issues/Themes:

Elvevag, B., Cohen, A. S. (2022). Translating Natural Language Processing (NLP) into mainstream schizophrenia assessment. Schizophrenia Bulletin, In Press.

Cohen, A. S. (2019). Advancing ambulatory biobehavioral technologies beyond proof of concept: Introduction to the special section. Psychological Assessment, 31(3), 277–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000694

Cohen, A. S., Chan, R. C., & Debbané, M. (2018). Crossing boundaries in schizotypy research: an introduction to the special supplement. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 44(suppl_2), S457-S459.