Caroline is an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. She leads the Research on Inclusive Solutions and Empowerment in Digital Health (RISE) Group and co-directs the Mental Health and Tech Special Interest Group at TU Delft. Dr. Figueroa is a medical doctor by background with a PhD in the neuroscience of depression from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Oxford, with several years of experience in clinical psychiatry. Before joining TU Delft, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is currently a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow and will spend a year at the University of Stanford conducting research on responsible AI for young people. She co-directs the Mental Health and Tech Special Interest Group at TU Delft.  Her work focuses on making digital mental health solutions—such as apps and chatbots—safe, effective, and accessible. She leads participatory design projects, where participants actively develop app concepts, co-create AI models, and analyze research data, ensuring the technology genuinely reflects their needs. Her research has directly informed policy documents by global organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) and has been published in leading journals including Lancet Digital Health, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and Human Brain Mapping.  Dr. Figueroa’s goal is to transform digital health policies and services, significantly improving mental healthcare access and quality.