Amy Nitza Joins UAlbany to Direct the Global Center for AI in Mental Health

By Erin Frick

ALBANY, N.Y. (May 6, 2025) — In April, the University at Albany welcomed Amy Nitza to direct the Global Center for AI in Mental Health (GCAIMH) — a collaborative research enterprise established in 2023 with partner institutions SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University and the U.N. Health Innovation Exchange. Nitza will lead UAlbany’s involvement in GCAIMH efforts to develop interdisciplinary AI-based tools to expand access to mental health diagnosis and treatment among underserved communities worldwide.

Nitza brings to the role deep expertise at the intersection of group psychology and disaster psychology, with a focus on training mental health professionals in international contexts. As a counseling psychologist, Nitza is interested in developing ways to build mental health care capacity, in particular, by training community mental health workers to deliver culturally competent, group-oriented care in settings where such resources are scarce.

Throughout her career, Nitza has worked to support people in crisis settings around the world. She has facilitated behavioral interventions to reduce HIV transmission in Botswana, trained mental health workers to support children in the wake of an earthquake in Haiti, and honed mental health supports for people affected by wildfires and hurricanes, among other types of disasters. Nitza’s most recent work, aimed closer to home, has focused on understanding the mental health needs of first responders in New York State.

Nitza is a former president of the American Psychological Association’s Society of Group Psychology and Group Psychotherapy. She joins UAlbany following eight years as the executive director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at SUNY New Paltz. 

Nitza shared insights on her professional path and recent research, ways that AI could be used to expand mental health care, and visions for her new role as director of the Global Center for AI in Mental Health at UAlbany. 

How did you come to specialize in group and disaster mental health care?

I am trained as a group psychologist, so I think in terms of groups and group dynamics and processes.

During my first faculty job at Purdue University Fort Wayne, I spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Botswana. The timing coincided with the peak of the HIV epidemic in that country, and my work looked at how to facilitate behavior change interventions for HIV prevention. At that point, the science of stopping transmission was understood, but little had been done to consider the cultural and contextual factors that facilitate behavioral changes that could keep people safe. 

A few years later, I met a Haitian psychologist who invited me to conduct group trainings for community mental health workers following a recent earthquake. There, we trained community mental health workers to facilitate small psychoeducational groups with children affected by the disaster, which we deployed in schools. 

Those two experiences, being in Botswana and in Haiti, deepened my interest in thinking about how to apply the best available psychological science to solve global mental health problems following disasters.

When I entered the world of disaster psychology from group psychology, I assumed that those two worlds were already talking to each other, but that wasn’t often the case. Disaster mental health response has traditionally focused on individuals. And people do group mental health work focusing on trauma, but not necessarily around disasters. Bridging those two aspects of my professional life is one of the key things I hope to continue. 

Can you explain the need to train community mental health workers to serve groups?  

In the U.S., we typically train people to facilitate therapy groups or counseling groups in the context of a full master's degree in counseling or social work, or a full doctorate in psychology. Those modes of training aren’t possible in places that don't offer those degrees. In Haiti, for example, there, we were working to isolate the skills needed to facilitate a good psychoeducational group and develop a way to train someone to do that work effectively outside of a full master's degree or doctoral program.

This is something that I've been passionate about for a long time. How do we train community mental health professionals to deliver group care in a way that is both culturally relevant to the setting, and tailored to support mental health needs that arise after a particular disaster?  

What has your recent research focused on? 

My recent work has been looking at the impact of disasters on first responders and developing interventions accordingly. Much of this work has been in collaboration with the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services (DHSES) and has included developing stress management and psychological resilience interventions. 

In January of this year, we released the New York State First Responder Mental Health Needs Assessment. With 6,000 survey respondents, we believe it is the largest sample of first responders’ mental health needs that has ever been done. The survey included representatives across law enforcement, fire response, EMS, 911, and emergency managers. We asked about mental health symptoms, what kind of support would be helpful, and what barriers stand in the way of getting help. 

I’m looking forward to collaborating with experts across the Global Center for AI in Mental Health to advance this work. I’m particularly interested in developing peer-to-peer interventions, with a focus on culturally responsive interventions that address the unique needs of first responders. 

How do you envision AI being used to expand mental health care? 

Globally, there is a large and growing gap in mental health care. Somebody, somehow, is going to have to fill that gap. I think we can use AI to help accomplish this. 

There is a lot of good science about what promotes psychological resilience. We know what people need. Now, it's about figuring out how to deliver effective interventions to the people who need them, where they are.

If people don't have access to mental health professionals who can support them in person, what if we could give them some other tool to help them build resilience skills and regulate themselves physiologically? This could take the form of an AI-supported platform that people can use to check in with themselves. It could be connecting people with each other to create a virtual support network.

At the heart of my interest is finding ways to use AI to support people providing face-to-face services—such as by developing trainings to “coach” mental health workers in delivering culturally responsive care. I'm excited to work with UAlbany’s AI Plus Institute faculty to make these things happen.

How can AI tools retain the ‘human connection’ intrinsic to mental health care? 

As a counseling psychologist, I believe fully in the therapeutic process and the power of human connection to facilitate change. In psychotherapy, the best predictor of outcome, hands down, is the quality of the relationship between the therapist and the client. I'm not trying to undo or change that. I'm trying to figure out, how do we supplement that? How do we enhance that? And how can we use the power of AI to strengthen the interventions that we already know work? 

For example, in areas lacking a strong mental health infrastructure, AI tools could be used to train community mental health workers to screen, to triage, to decide what intervention might be most useful. In this vision, we’re supporting people, not replacing people. 

I can approach these questions from a mental health clinical perspective and then consult with AI experts within the Global Center to figure out how we can use AI technologies to respond. That's what a university should be doing, so I'm really excited to begin.