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Alumni Profiles Series: Kibby McMahon
Dr. Katherine (Kibby) McMahon is the co-founder and CEO of KulaMind, a startup providing app-based support to people caring for loved ones with mental illness. KulaMind provides personalized coaching and guided strategies using digital tools based on clinical research. Kibby received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia University in 2008, and before arriving at Duke for her doctoral studies in 2014, Kibby held several research roles with labs at Columbia, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, the New York Psychiatric Institute, and the Weill Cornell Medical Center. Kibby received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology working with Dr. Zach Rosenthal. Following her Ph.D., Kibby continued her work at the Center for Misophonia and Emotion Regulation for two years before taking her skills to industry. Kibby worked as a clinical reviewer for Noom before co-founding KulaMind, where she currently directs clinical content and strategy for AI-powered mental health solutions.
What was the most meaningful research project that you worked on during your time at Duke?
One of the most meaningful clinical experiences for me was doing Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which is what my advisor specialized in. We had a program called Through Thick and Thin, which provided psychoeducation for family members of our patients, people with extreme emotion dysregulation. That was a meaningful experience for me on the clinical side.
On the other hand, what I did on the research side that I loved was my dissertation, which was testing an emotion regulation skill, mindful breathing, and delivering that training through people’s smartphones to see how it impacted the way they perceived other people’s emotions, which it did! Ultimately, when participants did more mindful breathing, they perceived negative emotions less accurately and positive emotions more accurately, meaning they had a positive bias when practicing mindful breathing.
Tell me more about what motivated you to start KulaMind. What did you see lacking in traditional mental health care that you could help improve?
People who have loved ones with mental illness have a hard time knowing what to do to help their loved ones or themselves. While they could get their own therapists or join support groups where they could find community and a place to talk about their issues, we found that a lot of the time the loved ones of our patients were still saying they didn’t know what to do as a caregiver. The motivation was about filling the gap of giving people strategies for managing their situation.
KulaMind uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help guide users. Tell me more about how you use AI in this setting.
Right now, the AI field is really exciting, like the wild west of technology. And if I were to give advice to students who are interested in this area, I would say to try to learn a little bit about machine learning or just AI in general. There are a lot of us startups out there who would be happy to collaborate with students for research projects. If you are a graduate student who is interested in doing research in this space, feel free to reach out.
AI is a great tool that is exploding right now, and ultimately my goal is to help people with loved ones with mental illness get interventions in the moment. That is one of the issues that Zach [Rosenthal] and my lab was focused on at Duke. For example, how do you help people learn skills and apply them to their daily lives? We found that they could come into therapy and realize they could benefit from setting boundaries with their loved one, but when they are home and receiving text messages from their daughter in crisis, they may feel too overwhelmed to apply their skills.
Right now, the whole field is trying to figure out where AI is going to be the most helpful in clinical psychology and in the world in general. I see it as a way to learn what someone needs and how to tailor our content for them over time. Essentially what we’re doing is building AI tools to help people learn these skills and then also using AI to carefully assess people’s mental health needs and goals in the long term. This might mean learning about a person’s values and learning about what they want out of their relationship with their loved one, and then teaching them the skills in a way that makes sense for them in their daily lives. What AI can do is personalize all the standardized content we have on mental health.
As a researcher, how do you see yourself incorporating research into the goals of your company?
I really do see learning as a big value of KulaMind, both by teaching customers to learn through using skills and us as a company learning through research. There are several different levels where research is helpful. The first is usability and UX research, which shows us how people interact with a specific intervention. What do they like? Who are they and what do they value? This helps to understand people and their relationship to the product.
There is also basic research. For example, we want to do research on people who live with mental illness and their caregivers on a larger scale. And then there’s the really important one, which I’m going to start once we launch the next version of our app in the fall, which will be a pilot study of a new intervention. It’ll be pretty similar to the work I did during my postdoc of testing a new treatment by recruiting some pilot participants, having them complete the program with coaching, and then measuring any clinical changes in their symptoms and receiving their feedback. Since there are now so many digital mental health companies, the ones that have data showing that their thing works is huge. I want to be able to show that I have this app for caregivers and loved ones and that our studies show that our patients experience many benefits on their depression or their burnout, etc., from our interventions. This research will be a really important component for us to be able to succeed.
What advice would you give to Ph.D. students who are interested in going into industry?
I think the main thing is not so much skills, but your connections, which is the same in academia. If you can in graduate school, work with a company or do an internship over the summer. Try to network and scan the Duke Alumni Network for people who are now in industry. Build those relationships the same way you would in academia, like when you go to a conference and connect with the person who you want to do a postdoc with. There are some differences in language for describing what you do, which can be learned by attending bootcamps and workshops for people who want to leave academia and go into industry. It’s not so much that the skills are different, but I think it is more of what your interests are and your tolerance for a different kind of environment. Academia moves a lot slower than industry, which can change directions very easily and is more variable. So, if you can be adaptable to change and work quickly, that’s a strength.
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AUTHOR
Natalia Espinosa
Ph.D. student, Psychology & Neuroscience
Natalia Espinosa is a third-year social psychology Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience. Prior to starting her graduate studies, Natalia received her bachelor's degree in neuroscience from Duke in 2019. She currently works under the supervision of Dr. Cristina Salvador in the Duke Culture Lab. Her research uses methods from neuroscience and psychology to examine how culture influences cognition, emotion, and the self.