Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Highlights from AAGP 2026

Attending this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry was both energizing and deeply meaningful for our team. It’s always a highlight to connect with colleagues who share a commitment to improving mental health care for older adults, and this year was especially exciting as several members of our lab took the stage to present our exciting new work.

Julia Chafkin Ph.D. delivered a talk to a standing-room-only audience which highlighted the remarkable outcomes of our Engage & Connect psychotherapy. With 97% attendance and 84% of participants successfully engaging in new social activities among older adults with depression, these findings point to a promising, scalable, and cost-effective way to increase social connectedness among older adults with depression.

Oded Bein Ph.D. shared two compelling lines of work: a presentation focused on using computational approaches and multimodal data to uncover mechanisms of psychotherapy and build precision treatment algorithms, and a talk presenting encouraging results on brain target engagement results from our Engage & Connect psychotherapy study. Together, these projects reflect an exciting step toward more personalized and effective interventions.

Michael Gallagher Ph.D. presented findings from our large-scale community implementation of psychotherapy (in collaboration with Jo Anne Sirey, Ph.D.), showing that about half of older adults achieved clinical response within just two sessions of therapy. It’s a striking result, with a preprint and further updates on the way.

We are incredibly fortunate to be part of a community filled with thoughtful, dedicated researchers and clinicians—many of whom have also become close friends—as we work toward a shared goal of improving the lives of aging adults.