Marc Aafjes
Founder & CEO
Marc has held various leadership roles with high-growth technology and data science companies over the last 20 years across the US, Europe, Asia, and MENA. He spent the first part of his career as a management consultant working across multiple industries including telecom, life sciences, and healthcare. He obtained graduate degrees in Management, Business Administration and Economics from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Throughout his career, Marc has built new businesses and teams that have had an outsized impact by developing novel solutions. Through his lived experience with behavioral and mental health, he has now dedicated himself to developing and delivering smarter ways to improve human well-being.
Outside of work, Marc enjoys spending time with his family, competing in triathlons, improving his chess game, and geeking out over brewing the ‘perfect’ cup of coffee.
David Liu
President
David Liu is President of Deliberate, where he pairs a biotechnology business model with a clear mission: using AI-enabled technology to improve the lives of people affected by mental health conditions. Over his career, he has built, led, and scaled companies and products across consumer internet, education, and healthcare technology.
David first saw how personalized technology at scale can reach and benefit millions of people when he led the launch of AOL.com. His commitment to mental health took shape at Weill Cornell Medicine and Quartet, where he saw firsthand what providers and patients face every day as they navigate the mental health crisis.
David holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. Outside of work, he cheers on his hometown Pittsburgh Steelers, drives classic sports cars, and spends time with his family, including their 6-pound maltipoo.
Jeffrey Cohn
Co-Founder
Jeff is a Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, a member of the Clinical Psychology Program at Pittsburgh, and an adjunct professor in Computer Science at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.
He leads interdisciplinary and inter-institutional efforts to develop advanced methods of automatic analysis and synthesis of facial expression and prosody and applies those tools to research in human emotion, social development, nonverbal communication, and computational psychiatry. His research has been supported by grants from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Autism Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among other sponsors. He has published over 500 papers with an h-index of 113 and 60k citations.
Outside of work, he relishes hiking and road biking. He lives in Pittsburgh and New York City with his wife, the writer Jane Bernstein, and Rozzie the dog.
Katie Aafjes-van Doorn
Co-Founder
Katie received a Master’s in Clinical Psychology from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, a Master’s in Psychological Research, as well as a doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Oxford, UK.
Katie is passionate about computational psychotherapy research and training. Her research interest is in the therapeutic relationship as well as its potential moderators and mediators of change. She is applying innovative methods of process codings of videos and transcripts, and outcome measurements in her research. Katie has published several empirical papers, co-authored an introductory book on clinical psychology, and chapters on process-outcome research. She is the Associate Editor for the journal Clinical Psychology: Science & Practice. To unwind from work, she enjoys getting messy with her grade schooler and getting some fresh air during runs in Central Park.
Risa Weisberg
VP, Head of Clinical Research
Risa Weisberg, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist, experienced digital health executive, and renowned scientist in the assessment and treatment of depression, anxiety, and other common mental and behavioral health problems. She is a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and an Adjunct Professor of Family Medicine at Brown University. Dr. Weisberg is a Fellow and former member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. She sits on the Scientific Council of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, where she recently served two terms on the Board of Directors. Prior to joining Deliberate Solutions, she was the Chief Scientific and Clinical Officer at RealizedCare.
Dr. Weisberg has an active and prolific research career, having been continually funded through 19 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Veterans Administration, and other research foundations for the last two decades. She is a frequent grant reviewer for NIH and international scientific funding agencies. She has authored or co-authored approximately 100 journal articles, book chapters, and books. Her research has focused on longitudinal assessment of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the use of technology to deliver more accessible interventions for common mental and behavioral health problems, including anxiety, depression, chronic pain, substance use disorders, and living with other chronic medical problems.
Robert Parrott
VP, Head of Engineering
Rob is a technology executive who thrives at the intersection of strategy and execution. With over 25 years of experience leading SaaS, cloud-native, and platform transformations, Rob has helped global companies like Nexthink, Veracode, CVS, and Pegasystems achieve scale, compliance, and business growth.
At Nexthink, Rob drove its public sector markets program and FedRAMP Moderate authorization while cutting monthly cloud costs and modernizing incident response and SRE practices. At Veracode, Rob rebuilt the architecture of a mission-critical SaaS platform, enabling a $2.5B exit and opening FedRAMP & EU markets. Earlier at CVS, Rob defined the architecture behind the Health Cloud, leveraging data from 100M+ customers to drive digital transformation in healthcare.
Rob enjoys building strong engineering cultures, mentoring the next generation of technical leaders, and guiding organizations through cloud transformation, M&A diligence and integration, and scale-up challenges. Rob has a BA in Physics and Cognitive Science and an MS in Physics from Dartmouth College and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University.
Marcelo Cicconet
Co-Founder & Director, Data Science
Marcelo is a co-founder of Deliberate AI, where he leads work on multimodal AI-based assessment of psychiatric and neurological health. He holds a PhD in mathematics from IMPA in Brazil and previously worked as a research scientist at Georgia Tech, New York University, and Harvard Medical School. His research spans signal processing, computer music, computer vision, and biomedicine, with work published in venues including CVPR, ICIP, and Nature.