Matthew Franco

Matthew is a Clinical Research Volunteer with the PREDiCTOR Study and a collaborator with the Multimodal Insights into Neuropsychiatric Disorders (MIND) Lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He is also a student in Columbia University’s Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program, completing coursework in physics, chemistry, and biology in preparation for medical school.

Matthew is motivated by a future in which treatments for psychiatric and neurological diseases are both readily accessible and perfectly optimized to the individual. To help build that future, he pursues research at the intersection of psychology, psychiatry, and data science, with a particular interest in how advances in AI and computational tools can accelerate scientific discovery. He is equally passionate about understanding how local and national policy can support the proliferation of high-quality medical care.

In the PREDiCTOR study at Mount Sinai, Matthew is part of the team charged with recruiting over 2,500 patients and helps manage day-to-day study operations across six hospital sites. Under the mentorship of Dr. Haas and Dr. Avraham Reichenberg, he is also leading a project exploring how machine learning and large language models can be used to infer cognitive states and predict outcomes in clinical populations.

Previously, Matthew was a student at New York University and graduated in 2025 with a B.A. in Psychology and additional coursework in data science. At NYU, Matthew was heavily involved in research. Under the mentorship of Dr. Emily Balcetis and in collaboration with Meta, he applied machine-learning approaches to understand how social media shapes social perception. He also pursued an honors thesis examining how various motivations influence political decision-making. For his thesis, he helped design and execute an online experiment that included managing a $50,000 budget to reach over 8,000 participants. For this work, he received the department’s outstanding incoming honors student award and outstanding thesis award. He is currently working with Dr. Balcetis on using large language models to explore how news media influences political attitudes.

Before entering research, Matthew was actively involved in politics, volunteering for local campaigns and interning in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. These experiences deepened his understanding of how policy shapes healthcare access and delivery. He hopes to integrate clinical research, computational tools, and policy insight in a future career in psychiatry, working to enhance the quality of psychiatric care for individuals and to ensure that more people can access it.

In his free time, Matthew is often helping to organize events with Columbia’s Postbac Premed Student Council, vibe coding an app of some sort, exploring new bars with friends, or watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].