Caroline Figueroa (TU Delft), core team member of the Healthy Start ambition ‘Mental well-being of youth’, has been awarded a Harkness Fellowship 2025–2026 by The Commonwealth Fund. Starting in September, she will spend a year in the United States working on her project about inclusive mental health apps for young people.

The project Caroline Figueroa will be working on is titled: ‘Engaging young people from diverse backgrounds in developing responsible AI for mental health’. This research builds on two Healthy Start Sprint projects for which she received funding in 2023 and 2024.

“I’m excited to collaborate with inspiring researchers at Stanford University and Hopelab in San Francisco, to meet new people, and to connect with organisations committed to supporting young people,” Caroline says. “My goal is to build bridges between youth organisations, policymakers, and tech companies. I hope the insights from my research will contribute—both in the US and in the Netherlands—to the development of AI tools that are youth-friendly, safe, and responsible. The ultimate aim is to provide policy recommendations for AI that truly reflect young people’s priorities and interests in mental health.”