Pratik Nair

Pratik Nair, has dedicated his entire career to promoting mental health: first by addressing farmer suicide through increasing access to formal, ethical credit, and then in increasingly more clinical settings. 

He’s now pursuing his Doctorate in Public Health (DrPH ‘28) to return to his public health roots, exploring how emerging technology can be leveraged and governed to promote mental health outcomes at scale. His venture, functional, does just that: employing AI to make the boring stuff exciting, while ensuring that care is always human-to-human. functional disrupts the hegemony that talk therapy and medication have on care. Capitalizing on emerging research it makes the distinction between mental health struggle and illness, and wagers that those who don’t have a diagnosable illness don’t need a clinical intervention. functional offers those struggling an alternative. Instead of forcing users into a diagnosis, it asks them to identify the root causes of their struggle and crafts a solution to address that dysfunction. In doing so, it capitalizes on the researched difference between mental and physical health. Where physical health requires addressing symptoms to improve patient outcomes, mental health is different, based in both real and perceptual worlds. You wouldn’t expect someone’s liver cirrhosis to improve because they found stable housing, but you could expect their mental health outcomes to improve. Extending this logic is how functional improves young people’s mental health: by setting them up to address challenges. Pratik founded functional with Shayan Yazdanpanah, a former-colleague who worked with him at a Canadian youth mental health charity. 

A Toronto native, Pratik cheers on his Toronto Raptors, Maple Leafs, and Blue Jays. He serves on the Public Health Agency of Canada Expert Roster on Suicide Prevention, has held non-profit board positions, and is pleased to be a Weatherhead Center Canada Research Fellow exploring AI governance to promote wellness and public health outcomes. His work has ranged from addressing social media and educational reform to overseeing one-to-one clinical support. He has armchair interests in foreign policy, literature, and never turns down the chance to shoot a basketball around.