Professor Jan Scott

Professor Jan Scott is Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Newcastle, UK, and a Distinguished Founding Fellow of the International Academy of Cognitive Therapy.

Professor Scott trained in psychiatry in Newcastle upon Tyne and was then a professor in Newcastle, Glasgow and the Institute of Psychiatry in London, before returning to Newcastle. Professor Scott also held visiting academic posts with Aaron Beck at the University of Penn in Philadelphia, Eugene Paykel at Cambridge University, and was the recipient of the RCPsych travelling scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, USA. She currently holds visiting posts in Paris, Trondheim and at the University of Sydney and is a Science without Borders Fellow in Brazil (especially working with academic centres and in early intervention settings in Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre). Her current H INDEX is reported as 90 and her ‘Research Interest Score’ (a metric used on research websites such as Research Gate) is higher than 99% of other research members. Whilst those quoted metrics attempt to measure productivity and the impact of publications, if a composite rating is used that combines research, publications, clinical expertise and key opinion leader status, her rankings in bipolar and unipolar disorders are (according to ‘Expert Mapper’): Worldwide Ranked 48th and 62nd, respectively.

Professor Greg Murray

Professor Greg Murray is currently Director of the Centre for Mental Health and Brain Sciences at Swinburne University in Melbourne. He conducts holistic research into bipolar disorders, circadian rhythms, and personality. He is ranked in the top 1% of researchers worldwide in each of these fields and is recognised as a world expert in mood disorders (Expertscape). He took out his PhD from the Trinder Sleep Lab at University of Melbourne in 2001 and has been a full Professor at Swinburne since 2011. He is a registered Clinical Psychologist and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society (APS) in 2013. Professor Murray’s > 230 journal articles are cited > 1000 times a year (Google Scholar) and he has been Chief Investigator on > $31 million in national and international competitive research funding. He is currently leading a 5-year Wellcome-Trust funded multi-national project investigating sleep and circadian disruption as a predictor of relapse in
bipolar disorder (2024-2029). Professor Murray’s chronobiology research has had significant translational impact. He was an expert consultant on the Wellcome Trust Sleep, Circadian Rhythms and Mental Health Report (2022), and has led two expert position papers by the International Society for Bipolar Disorders Chronobiology and Chronotherapeutics Task Force (2021, 2020). As an author of DSM-5-TR (2022), he introduced chronobiological vulnerability to the diagnosis of bipolar I disorder, and he authored the sleep content for the Clinical Guidelines for Lifestyle-based Care in Depression (2022). His Conversation article on the psychology of sleep disturbance has been read more than 1.3 million times.

Professor Richard Porter

Richard Porter is Professor and head of the Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Otago, Christchurch and a Consultant Psychiatrist in a service for adults with intellectual disability. He trained in psychiatry in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne where his clinical training focussed on the treatment of resistant mood disorders. Recently his research has focused on psychological and chronobiological treatments for mood disorders and treatments for neuropsychological impairment in depression and bipolar disorder. Events in Christchurch have also led to an interest in PTSD and the mental health effects of natural disasters and terrorism. He has published over 250 scientific papers. He is an author of the 2020 Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists Mood Disorder Guidelines and Deputy Editor of British Journal of Psychiatry Open.

Dr Craig Macneil

Dr. Macneil graduated with a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 1997.  He joined the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC) in Melbourne in 2001, where he is a Senior Clinical Psychologist.  He began work with the First Episode Mania Team at EPPIC at its inception in 2003, and has since undertaken research and clinical work to develop psychological interventions for this population. Dr. Macneil has lectured and facilitated workshops locally, interstate, and internationally, and is a Clinical Associate of three Melbourne universities.  He has written and co-written over 40 research articles and is first author of Bipolar Disorder in Young People: A Psychological Intervention Manual.

Professor Colleen Loo

Ketamine and Psilocybin Assisted Therapy for Treatment Resistant Depression – more in common than realised?”

Colleen Loo is a psychiatrist, Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Leadership Fellow and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and the Black Dog Institute, Sydney; Australia. She is an internationally recognised clinical expert and researcher in the fields of electroconvulsive therapy, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and ketamine, and led the first Australian RCTs of these interventions in depression. She has published over 300 peer reviewed papers and has received competitive grant funding from the Australian NHMRC, MRFF and major overseas grant funding agencies.

Prof Loo is active in ECT, Neurostimulation and novel treatments research, practice and policy, providing advice to Australian government health departments, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, and several international guidelines. She was President of the International Society for ECT and Neurostimulation (ISEN) 2018-2020. She has served on the Editorial Boards of the two leading international brain stimulation journals: Journal of ECT, Brain Stimulation. She directs professional training courses in ECT, TMS, tDCS and ketamine.

Professor Michelle Banfield

Michelle Banfield is Co-Director & Lived Experience Research Lead for the ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation, Head of Lived Experience Research at the Australian National University (ANU) Centre for Mental Health Research and Chair of the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee. As a career academic living with bipolar disorder, Michelle’s work centres on embedded lived experience in research and translation. For over 20 years, she has been conducting research in partnership with others with lived experience and within the sector to develop and implement effective mental health research, services and policy reform. Michelle will be talking about her experiences in combining her lived and academic expertise for a unique and challenging career.

Dr Jennifer Nicholas

Co-chair

Dr Jen Nicholas is a research fellow at the Centre for Youth Mental health, University of Melbourne and Orygen, the world’s largest youth mental health research institute. Her research interests relate to how technology can both i) increase the availability, effectiveness, and reach of mental health interventions, and ii) support services to provide 21st century mental health care.

Jen completed her PhD in digital mental health for early intervention in bipolar disorder in late 2017 at the University of New South Wales and the Black Dog Institute. She then spent 18months at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA, at the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies as a postdoctoral research fellow, before returning to Australia as a Research Fellow at Orygen.

In 2022, Jen will begin her NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellowship in digital mental health implementation. For years, evidence-based digital interventions have promised to address limitations in accessing high quality, sustainable mental health care – but have so far failed to deliver. Her work will address this failure of research translation by refining, evaluating, and disseminating key implementation strategies in digital youth mental health and designing the next generation of implementation-ready digital interventions. This work will build on her recent research on the integration of MOST, a digital youth mental health intervention into youth mental health services across Victoria.