The HEAT-MIND Lab

Join Groundbreaking Climate-Mental Health Research
The HEAT-MIND Lab app connects you to cutting-edge research exploring how rising temperatures affect mental health. By participating, you'll contribute to science that could protect millions as our planet warms.

Why This Research Matters
Climate change isn't just an environmental issue – it's a mental health crisis. Young adults are particularly vulnerable, experiencing a 3% increase in suicide rates for every 2°F temperature rise during the summer – that's an effect as large as what we see after major environmental disasters. That's why our research focuses on your age group. With global temperatures expected to rise by nearly 8°F by 2100, we urgently need solutions.

The Challenge We're Addressing
While we know heat affects mental health, we don't fully understand how. Does it disrupt sleep? Make it harder to think clearly? Interfere with exercise and socializing? Understanding these pathways is crucial for developing effective interventions.

How the App Works
As a participant, you'll wear small sensors that continuously monitor the temperature and humidity around you, along with sleep and activity trackers. Through the app, you'll complete regular surveys about your mood, depression symptoms, and cognitive performance over one month.

For the first time, we'll see how real-world temperature exposures relate to mental health symptoms, sleep quality, thinking ability, and physical activity patterns in everyday settings. We’ll see if daytime versus nighttime heat exposure affects mood differently. We’ll also see if factors like gender, race, education, income, geography, or medications make people more vulnerable or protected.

Real-World Impact
Your participation will help us identify targets for practical, affordable interventions to maintain mental wellness during hot weather. We're committed to developing clinical guidelines that reduce human suffering as temperatures rise.

Our Broader Mission
HEAT-MIND Lab (Healthy Environments and Temperatures – Mechanisms in Neuropsychiatric Disorders) integrates lived experiences of people with mental health conditions into every aspect of our research. We're training the next generation of researchers and sharing our methods so scientists worldwide can advance this critical field.

We believe in meeting people where they are, sharing findings through