Bruno Kluwe-Schiavon, PhD

Biography

Dr. Bruno Kluwe-Schiavon is a psychologist and an Instructor (Research) in the Louis A. Faillace, M.D., Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Zurich (Laboratory of Experimental and Clinical Pharmacopsychology, University Hospital of Psychiatry). He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), followed by a junior researcher appointment at the Research Center for Psychological Science (Decision in Context Lab), University of Lisbon (Portugal).

Dr. Kluwe-Schiavon’s work integrates data science with clinical and experimental psychology to build scalable, linguistically informed tools that improve prevention and treatment in different populations. His research program centers on linguistic phenotyping, the extraction of behavioral, cognitive, and affective markers from natural language, to explain how biopsychosocial factors shape reasoning, affective processing, and decision-making, particularly in the context of substance use, trauma, and related psychopathologies. He applies these methods within experimental and translational designs, combining NLP, acoustic analysis, and statistical learning to translate qualitative narratives into interpretable, quantifiable indicators that can guide equitable, trauma-informed interventions.

Methodologically, his expertise spans mixed-effects modeling, penalized regression, Bayesian inference, network and path analysis, structural equation and factor models, and multi-omics integration, alongside reproducible R/Python pipelines for natural language and acoustic processing. His publications cover clinical and experimental psychology, including decision-making, substance use disorders, and early-life adversity, and include work on meta-analysis, meta-regression, and biostatistics, as well as adaptation and validation of interviews, questionnaires, and neuropsychological tasks. At UTHealth Houston, Dr. Kluwe-Schiavon collaborates within the Center for Neurobehavioral Research on Addiction (CNRA), HEARTS@UTHealth Houston (HIV Education, Awareness, Referral and Treatment for Substance use disorders), and the HEROES Program (Health Equity Research Organized to Empower Solutions) to deploy computational tools in real-world clinical and community settings.