28th Annual Meeting of the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology

Professor Alex Fornito
ARC Future Fellow, Psychology
Monash University

Alex completed his Clinical Masters (Neuropsychology) and PhD in 2007 in the Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology at The University of Melbourne before undertaking post-doctoral training in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, UK, under the auspices of an NHMRC Training Fellowship. He is currently a Viertel Foundation Fellow, Professor, and co-Director of the Brain and Mental Health Research Hub within the Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences.

Alex¹s research concentrates on developing new imaging techniques for mapping human brain connectivity and applying these methods to shed light on brain function in health and disease. A major emphasis of his work focuses on understanding foundational principles of brain organisation and their genetic basis; characterising brain connectivity disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia; and mapping how brain networks dynamically reconfigure in response to changing task demands.

Professor Tom Johnstone
Director of Brain Imaging
University of Reading and Swinburne University of Technology (from August 2018)

Tom Johnstone followed a BSc in Physics and PGDip in Cognitive Science at the University of Western Australia, with a PhD based at the University of Geneva, where he investigated the physiological mechanisms underlying emotion-affected speech. He then pursued postdoctoral research training in cognitive neuroscience of emotion and psychopathology at the University of WisconsinMadison under Richard Davidson and Ned Kalin.

Johnstone's ongoing research combines methods in functional and structural MRI, EEG and peripheral psychophysiology to probe the neural circuitry of emotion regulation in healthy individuals as well as those with mood and anxiety disorders, those at elevated risk for such disorders, and those with socioemotional processing deficits such as autism.

In his most recent research, Johnstone is applying simultaneously measured EEG and fMRI to model prefrontal and limbic modulation of early visual processing of socially relevant and emotional stimuli in autism.

Professor Sharon Naismith MAPS CCN
Leonard P Ullmann Chair in Psychology & NHMRC Dementia Leadership Fellow
Charles Perkins Centre, School of Psychology and the Brain and Mind Centre

Professor Sharon Naismith is a Clinical Neuropsychologist, National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Dementia Leadership Fellow and holds the Leonard P Ullman Chair at the University of Sydney. She also heads the Healthy Brain Ageing Program at the Brain and Mind Centre, a one-of-its-kind early intervention clinic for dementia.

Her work focuses on modifiable risk factors for dementia and clinical interventions for early cognitive decline including cognitive training, depression, sleep, dietary, e-health and pharmacological interventions. She is currently Chief Investigator on competitive grants totalling ~$11 million including two NHMRC Centres of Research Excellence. She has co-authored more than 230 papers since 2001, and her work has been cited more than 7500 times.

She currently leads the team of a large program investigating the nature of sleep-wake disturbance in neurodegenerative disease.