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KAIST announced the official launch of the KAIST Mind Care & Growth Center (KMCG), a new integrated platform that strengthens mental health support for students and faculty while advancing digital mental health research. To mark the occasion, KAIST hosted an international symposium titled "Human Behavior and Mental Health" on June 10, 2026, at the Cho Su-mi Hall in the Chang Young Shin Student Activity Center on its main Daejeon campus.
The symposium drew significant interest from both academia and the public, with pre-registration reaching capacity within just one week of opening. More than 300 KAIST faculty members, researchers, students, and global digital health experts attended, underscoring the urgent demand for advanced mental health frameworks in the era of artificial intelligence.
A Unified Hub for Integrated Mental Health Support
The KMCG consolidates psychological counseling, psychiatric care, and crisis intervention services that were previously dispersed across campus, expanding and reorganizing the existing student counseling center. By eliminating the inconvenience of navigating multiple support channels, the center provides more systematic, seamless, and consistent care under one roof.
Going beyond a traditional counseling center, the KMCG serves as a living laboratory that fuses real-world mental health expertise with KAIST's research capabilities. Researchers from artificial intelligence, brain science, industrial design, digital humanities, mathematics, and computer science collaborate to develop and evaluate new approaches to mental health support — delivering evidence-based interventions to students, gathering practice-based insights, and continuously improving services.
Keynote: Global Collaboration with UCSF Neuroscape
The keynote address was delivered by Professor Adam Gazzaley, Founder and Executive Director of Neuroscape at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and co-founder of Akili Interactive, developer of EndeavorRx — the world's first FDA-authorized prescription video game treatment.
Professor Gazzaley presented the latest advances in digital mental health, including VR-based cognitive training and multimodal biosensing. Neuroscape's interdisciplinary model — integrating clinical neuroscience, engineering, design, and AI — stands as a leading example of the convergence research that KMCG seeks to promote, and serves as a benchmark for building a multidisciplinary mental health innovation ecosystem at KAIST.
In subsequent lightning talk sessions, KAIST faculty from mathematics, brain engineering, AI, computer science, industrial design, and digital humanities presented future research directions and discussed opportunities for global collaboration with Neuroscape.
New Research: Generative AI as a Clinically Ambivalent Technology
In parallel with its service mission, the KMCG is already generating impactful scientific insights. Center Director Dooyoung Jung recently co-authored a study with Professor Chul-Hyun Cho of Korea University College of Medicine, published on June 2, 2026, in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), examining the impact of generative AI on psychiatric practice.
<(From Left) Ph. D candidate Myungsung Kim, Professor Yoosuk An, Professor Dooyoung Jung, Professor Chul-Hyun Cho>
Based on the real-world clinical experiences of 311 Korean psychiatrists, the study found that generative AI may help organize emotions, support self-care, and improve access to treatment — but may also create risks such as overdependence, reinforcement of distorted beliefs, and potentially dangerous situations depending on patient vulnerability and context of use.
The research team described generative AI as a "clinically ambivalent technology" and emphasized that it should assist, not replace, human therapists. Safe adoption requires technological reliability, clinical validation, crisis response systems, and robust governance by medical professionals.
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Leadership Perspectives
Dooyoung Jung, Director of the KMCG, stated: "A healthy mind is the foundation for achieving outstanding research. We will develop the Mind Care & Growth Center into a platform that leads mental health solutions for universities across Korea."
KAIST President Kwang Hyung Lee remarked: "In an era where artificial intelligence is replacing even high-level human intellectual labor, our greatest concern is not technological deficiency, but the potential erosion of human-centered values and culture. Technology must remain a tool guided by human wisdom and philosophy — not the other way around."
As AI becomes more deeply embedded in everyday life, the KMCG is positioned to address new mental health challenges arising from AI dependency while harnessing digital technology in ways that support human flourishing. Pre-registration for the symposium has closed, but interested members of the public were welcome to attend on-site. Some services and amenities were limited.
