Akash Wasil grew up in Long Island, NY. He attended Half Hollow Hills High School East, where he was actively involved in Lincoln-Douglas Debate. After high school, Akash attended Harvard College, where he served as a peer counselor for Harvard’s Eating Concern Hotline and Outreach group (ECHO), an editor for the Harvard Political Review, and a singer with the Harvard Notables.
At Harvard, Akash joined the Weisz Lab for Youth Mental Health, where he developed an interest in scalable mental health interventions. Akash became interested in understanding the common elements in empirically supported treatments. He worked with Dr. Weisz to identify common elements in smartphone apps for depression and anxiety and to design a brief lay counselor intervention for Kenyan high school students. Akash became especially interested in "wise interventions”-- brief, targeted interventions that could be widely disseminated at low costs.
At Penn, Akash is working with Dr. Robert DeRubeis to develop, adapt, and test interventions for young adults in India, Kenya, Greece, and the United States. He is also working on several review papers to better understand, characterize, and evaluate smartphone applications for common mental health problems.
Beyond research, Akash is interested in musical theatre, eSports, creative writing, and music composition. His favorite musicals are Book of Mormon and If/Then, and his favorite eSports are Starcraft II and Teamfight Tactics.