Two sisters with different perspectives
Carla was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 14. For 22 years, she struggled to manage the symptoms and difficulties of her diagnosis. Carla's family and friends also feel helpless in their efforts to help her. The overall lack of accessible and thoughtful tools and technologies to support our community has been frustrating.
The pandemic has been difficult for all but especially those battling mental illness, and during this time, our family experienced that firsthand. We decided, as sisters, to tackle this problem and build an integrative platform designed based on our first-hand experience of the needs and pains experienced by those living with serious mental illnesses and their loved ones.
Carla Halteh
Co-Founder & President
First-hand experience of living with bipolar disorder and with various treatment options.
First-hand experience of living with bipolar disorder and with various treatment options.
Lourica Halteh
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
First-hand experience loving someone living with bipolar disorder.
First-hand experience loving someone living with bipolar disorder.
More about our clinical & research advisors
Alexandra Mejia
Mental Health Counselor, LMHC, CP-D
Alexandra is a licensed mental health counselor specializing in trauma, personality, mood, and anxiety disorders. She utilizes evidence-based treatment modalities such as CBT, DBT, RO-DBT, Mindfulness, and Exposure therapy. Alexandra joined Waverider early on and has been an instrumental voice advising the team. Her passion and commitment to helping her clients work towards behavioral development goals through self-awareness and consistent work, inside and outside of therapy sessions, has informed our thinking behind our behavioral tracker.
William Kuo
Psychotherapist, LCSW
Will is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who specializes in using Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), and other evidence-based treatments. Will joined the team while creating the DBT-inspired tracker and brought his extensive knowledge and experience into the design and development work. Will currently treats clients in private practice and has always had a passion for technology and integrating it with mental health treatment. Will has a great deal of experience dating back to his work as a Research Assistant in Marsha Linehan’s Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics (BRTC) at the University of Washington, as well as having received his graduate training at the Columbia University School of Social Work Dialectical Behavior Therapy Training Program. Will has worked in various settings, including hospitals, private practices, and correctional settings.
Simone Skeen
MA, Clinical Researcher and Chair, Ethics Advisory Board
Simone J. Skeen (she/they) is a student and Dean’s Research Council Scholar in the Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences Ph.D. program at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Trained as a mental health counselor, her work explores the methods and discipline of intervention co-design: foregrounding the voices of people who experience unmet healthcare needs every day. She has played an integral role in designing, adapting, and trialing NIH-funded mHealth projects focused on HIV prevention and trauma-informed mental healthcare. She consulted for the Deputy Commission of Mental Hygiene in New York City and the Center for Translational Behavioral Science in Florida. In addition to her work for Waverider, her current directions include the synthesis of platform-agnostic digital bioethics guidelines and the piloting of innovative text analytics that bridge the rigor of natural language processing with the artistry of human-centered design.