About DPSIG

Dr Faith Ndebele is a fully remote working Virtual Consultant Psychiatrist, Digital Innovation Lead Mental Health at Solent NHS Trust and Clinical Lead for Neurodiversity Pathways, HIOW.

An NHS consultant psychiatrist since 2003, she has extensive clinical experience and has worked in a variety of settings. Prior to her current role she worked for over 10 years as a consultant psychiatrist in psychiatric intensive care (PICU).  She is among the first consultant psychiatrists to pioneer 100% remote working in the NHS and is excited to contribute to the development of this innovative role which includes digital remote clinical assessments in community general adult mental health and early intervention in psychosis, virtual clinical and educational supervision of postgraduate doctors, teaching, and research.

She is a digital health enthusiast, interested in exploring and developing flexible, novel ways of working in mental health supported by technology as well as contributing to projects that promote staff wellbeing.

Faith became DPSIG Chair in June 2024.

Iain currently works as a General Adult Registrar in Oxford, he also acts as a medical advisor and member of the clinical safety group for Thalamos LTD; a software company that have digitised the Mental Health Act process. Iain is a Member of the faculty of Clinical Informatics and has an interest in the use of data and digital clinical safety with the emergence of new software, electronic health records and telepsychiatry.

Iain brings the Digital Psychiatry Special Interest Group several different perspectives on informatics in Psychiatry;  the view of the trainee, the independent developer and the Clinical Safety Officer. Iain has represented the Digital Psychiatry SIG at the NHSX Digital Clinical Safety Strategy Consultation workshops to guide the future direction of digital applications in healthcare.

Dr Mariana Pinto da Costa (MD, MSc, PhD) is a clinical academic with expertise in Digital Mental Health, Global Mental Health and Medical Education. In her doctoral research, she explored the views of different stakeholders (mental health professionals, volunteers and patients) about the potential of social relationships between people with severe mental illness and volunteers through different formats (face-to-face or using technology) in different European countries.

She developed a new digital volunteering intervention - the Phone Pal - that connects patients and volunteers in the community through smart-phones, which she tested in a trial. She was nominated by Columbia University as one of the Top 100 Innovative Women Leaders in Global Mental Health.

She also has clinical and research experience in Africa, where she was screening alcohol, smoking and other substances involvement, in primary and mental health care users in Luanda, while studying for the International Master on Mental Health Policy and Services at the New University of Lisbon supported by the WHO.

She is past president of the European Federation of Psychiatric trainees (EFPT), and has been the Chief Investigator and study manager of the Brain Drain Study, researching mobility experiences of psychiatric trainees in 33 European countries. 

Shivani is currently a CAMHS Specialist Registrar at South London and the Maudsley. Her special interest includes medical education and digital health.

Shivani has been involved in organising several digital Psychiatry events including the HackMentalHealth San Francisco Hackathon, and the Digital Innovation in Mental Health Conference. Shivani has extensive medical education experience and has completed an MSc in Medical Education at UCL.

Bijal Sangoi is a Speciality Registrar in Forensic Psychiatry and an honorary Psychiatry Teaching Tutor for HEE West Midlands Post Graduate School of Psychiatry.

Working in psychiatry for eight years, Bijal is an IMG working in the UK since 2019. Her interests include promoting psychiatry, creating awareness about mental health inequalities and medical education. 

Outside of work, she is enthusiastic about travelling, and also has a keen interest in writing and reading all things fiction or non-fiction. In her own words, “I am relatively new to the world of digital psychiatry, but enjoying every moment of it while learning so many fantastic and geeky aspects of digital technology along the way.”

Dr Amit Bansal is a General Adult ST6 Psychiatrist in East London Foundation Trust. 

He has worked on a number of innovation projects in post. Most recently this has involved automation of upload of Clozapine results to a collaborative platform for more easy access. He has an interest in user design that is currently being developed as part of an Msc program at UCL and is currently exploring how to improve digital literacy within his current organisation as part of a Quality improvement initiative. Amit has a combination of some technical skills and an interest in user experience that he hopes to bring together in various forms through implementation of various digital technologies. 

Dr Romayne Gadelrab was one of two founding chairs of the Digital SIG and remains on the executive committee.

Romayne is an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, and a Clinical Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, Kings College London. Romayne is interested in the effects of technology on our mental health.

Following her Maudsley psychiatry training, she studied Innovation at the Elisava School of Design, Barcelona and is keen to see the integration of new technologies in mental health. She also works as an honorary Doctor at the National Centre for Gaming Disorders with a special interest in problematic use of the internet and gaming. 

George is an Academic Clinical Fellow at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the IoPPN, King’s College London. He has a research interest in digital phenotyping, which he has previously investigated at Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry, where he remains an Honorary Member.

He holds a Topol Digital Health Fellowship, providing healthcare professionals with training to lead digital health innovations. George also has a keen interest in public engagement and has previously served for the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Public Education Editorial Board.

Dr Zain Hussain is an Academic Core Psychiatry Trainee (CT1) in NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, and an Honorary Clinical Lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He was previously a Foundation Fellow for the Royal College of Psychiatrists (2020-22).

He is an aspiring clinical academic and aims to work at the intersection of data science, digital technologies and psychiatry. He is particularly interested in risk prediction models, and the use of natural language processing (for digital phenotyping, and social media analysis). He has published his work in a number of journals, including eClinical Medicine, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, Journal of Medical Internet Research and BMJ Open. 

In 2018, he was the joint winner of the 'Public Health Product Forge' Hackathon, where he formed the team ‘Docmetrics’ and developed a data analytics tool for General Practice. In 2019, he received the Palliative Care Section Research Prize from the Royal Society of Medicine, for his work on predicting patient prognosis in critical care using artificial neural networks.

In 2020, he worked as an Honorary Clinical Research Fellow as part of a team at the University of Edinburgh, to develop a novel Artificial Intelligence powered dashboard for COVID-19-related public sentiment and opinion mining in social media platforms, for informing national policy considerations. More recently, he was awarded the NIHR Mental Health TRC and Royal College of Psychiatrists Research Taster Award in 2022, as part of which he completed a short placement at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford.

He also has a keen interest in medical education and is an Associate Faculty Member of the Clinical Educator Programme at the University of Edinburgh. He supervises research projects for Year 1 MBChB students, which are focussed on the use of digital technologies in healthcare.

David Rigby was one of two founding co-chairs of the Digital SIG and now remains on the executive committee.

He is an ST7 in General Adult and Older Adult Psychiatry currently working in Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust. He has a Postgraduate Diploma in Medical Education and used to be the Mentoring Lead for East and North East London NHS Foundation Trust.

Outside of work, David is a keen gamer and VR enthusiast. He is the co-founder of PsychTech, a yearly conference on the theme of technology and mental health.