Dr. Torous is Director of Digital Psychiatry and a staff psychiatrist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Trained in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley before earning his medical degree at UC San Diego, he completed psychiatry residency, a fellowship in clinical informatics, and a master's degree in biomedical informatics at Harvard. The combined background of engineer, physician, and informaticist shapes an approach that pairs technical rigor with clinical reality: technology in mental health should be held to the same standards of evidence, safety, and equity as any other treatment.

Dr. Torous's research spans digital phenotyping from smartphone and wearable data, smartphone-based interventions, and the evaluation of artificial intelligence in mental health care. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed articles, and his team's work has directly shaped how the field evaluates and deploys new technology: he led the creation of the American Psychiatric Association's broadly adopted app evaluation framework, and he now co-develops patient-centered benchmarks for AI in mental health in partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), including the MindBench.ai platform for evaluating large language models in mental health care. In November 2025 he testified before the U.S. Congress on artificial intelligence and mental health.
Alongside the research, his division builds and freely shares the infrastructure the field needs. These efforts include mindapps.org, the largest publicly available database of mental health apps, updated continuously so that clinicians and patients can make informed choices; mindLAMP, an open-source platform for digital phenotyping and intervention used by research teams around the world; the Digital Navigator and DOORS programs, which train staff and patients so that digital care reaches those who need it most rather than only the digitally fluent; and the Digital Psychiatry Clinic at BIDMC, one of the first clinics to integrate patient-generated smartphone data into routine psychiatric care.
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Dr. Torous serves as Editor-in-Chief of JMIR Mental Health and web editor for JAMA Psychiatry, is a member of NAMI's Scientific Advisory Council, and advises national and international organizations on digital mental health policy and implementation. He teaches and mentors across Harvard Medical School and lectures widely on how clinicians, health systems, and policymakers can evalaute and use new technologies for mental health.