I’m a PhD candidate at Penn State University in the Wellbeing and Health Innovation Lab advised by Dr Saeed Abdullah. I work where digital health, mental health informatics, and financial technologies meet.

My research aims to understand how financial technologies might help with these unique financial challenges faced by those living with bipolar disorder. I believe it is worth investigating whether it is possible, acceptable, or even appropriate to involve the financial lives of this population in clinical contexts given the magnitude and severity of these challenges.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) considers “engaging in unrestrained buying sprees or foolish business investments” as part of the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder, a chronic, episodic and serious mental illness. The APA considers this to have “a high potential for painful consequences.”

For those impacted by this illness – including families, friends, and caregivers – these painful consequences are often quite material and last far longer than symptomatic periods. For example, in a population-scale study analyzing the credit histories and health records of 46,167 individuals, those with bipolar disorder type I were shown to be at a 50% greater likelihood of declaring bankruptcy than the healthy population.

My goals throughout this PhD have been (1) to surface the common stories surrounding this pervasive, understudied, and complex set of issues, and (2) to collect usable evidence regarding how fintech-based digital health interventions might appropriately, respectfully, and privately support those individuals who want support in managing their financial lives in light of this condition.

To this end, I have explored how individuals’ privacy preferences regarding financial data sharing with care partners vary among demographic groups along with assessing the role that adverse clinical or financial life play in individuals’ acceptance of involving trusted third parties in fintech-enabled digital interventions. Currently I am investigating (1) how minimally-collected, de-identified financial data might be predictive of latent illness states, and (2) which fintech-enabled digital interventions are most preferred by this population.

I am supported by the National Science Foundation via the Graduate Research Fellowship Program and have received support from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Previously, I led the digital transformation of what was considered one of the country’s largest and highest-quality closely-held Medicaid groups, Smiles 4 Keeps Pediatric Dentistry. With minimal supervision and years of close mentorship by its owner, I stewarded this unique group from paper operations to a centralized (and salable) state by integrating OpenDental in the midst of a cross-generational transfer of family leadership. 😮‍💨

I am a long-time (like, 2011 long-time 👴) advocate for mental health issues and am open about living with bipolar disorder. If this sort of thing interests you, you may want to check out my essay Nobody Falls Halfway.

My CV is available here.

Selected Publications and Presentations

The Currency of Mood: Assessing Acceptance and Privacy Preferences of Third-party Financial Data Sharing in Bipolar Disorder

Jeff Brozena, Johnna Blair, Dahlia Mukherjee, Erika F.H. Saunders, M.D., Thomas Richardson, Mark Matthews, and Saeed Abdullah. In submission.
[preprint]

Mapping Financial Behavior in Bipolar Disorder: Development of a Dataset Linking Spending Habits to Mood Fluctuations

Jeff Brozena, Johnna Blair, Dahlia Mukherjee, Erika F.H. Saunders, M.D., Saeed Abdullah. To be presented at the 28th Annual Conference of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, Vancouver, Canada, September 2026.

Evidence-based Digital Design: Utilizing MaxDiff Findings to Guide the Development of Financial Interventions in Bipolar Disorder

Jeff Brozena, Saeed Abdullah. To be presented at the 28th Annual Conference of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, Vancouver, Canada, September 2026.

Eight Years of Autonomic Monitoring: An N-of-1 Longitudinal Study of Wearable-derived HRV Anomalies and Self-reported Mood Logs

Jeff Brozena, Saeed Abdullah, Lan Kong, Erika F.H. Saunders, Guodong Liu. To be presented at the 28th Annual Conference of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders, Vancouver, Canada, September 2026.

Supportive Fintech for Individuals with Bipolar Disorder: Financial Data Sharing Preferences to Support Longitudinal Care Management

Jeff Brozena, Johnna Blair, Thomas Richardson, Mark Matthews, Dahlia Mukherjee, Erika F. H. Saunders, Saeed Abdullah. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2024)
[paper]

Financial Technologies (fintech) for Mental Health: The Potential of Objective Financial Data to Better Understand the Relationships Between Financial Behavior and Mental Health

Johnna Blair, Jeff Brozena, Mark Matthews, Thomas Richardson & Saeed Abdullah. Frontiers in Psychiatry (2023)
[paper]