Affiliates and Collaborators
Affiliates
- Professor Anthony Burkitt
NeuroEngineering Lab
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Professor Anthony Burkitt
Professor Anthony Burkitt is the Research Director of Bionic Vision Australia (BVA) and Professor of Engineering at the University of Melbourne.
BVA is a partnership of world-leading Australian research institutions collaborating to develop an advanced retinal prosthesis, or bionic eye, to restore the sense of vision to people with degenerative or inherited retinal disease. The partners of Bionic Vision Australia are the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales, the Bionic Ear Institute, the Centre for Eye Research Australia and NICTA.
In December 2009 Bionic Vision Australia (BVA) was awarded $42 million from the Federal Government. Professor David Penington says the grant, provided over four years, will take the team to the point where commercial development of an implant at the back of the eye, responding to wireless transmission of vision, will become a reality.
- Professor Anthony Hannan
Epigenetics and Neural Plasticity Lab
Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health
Professor Anthony Hannan
Professor Anthony Hannan is an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and Head of the Epigenetics and Neural Plasticity Laboratory, Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne. Prof. Hannan received his undergraduate training and PhD in neuroscience from the University of Sydney. He was then awarded a Nuffield Medical Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where he subsequently held other research positions before returning to Australia on an NHMRC RD Wright Career Development Fellowship to establish a laboratory at the Florey Institute. He subsequently won other fellowships and awards, including an ARC FT3 Future Fellowship and NHMRC Senior Research Fellowship.
Prof. Hannan and colleagues provided the first demonstration in any genetic animal model that environmental stimulation can be therapeutic. This has led to new insights into gene-environment interactions in various brain disorders, including Huntington’s disease, dementia, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety disorders and autism spectrum disorders.
His research team at the Florey explores how genes and the environment combine via experience-dependent plasticity in the healthy and diseased brain. Their research includes models of specific neurological and psychiatric disorders which involve cognitive and affective dysfunction, investigated at behavioural, cellular and molecular levels so as to identify pathogenic mechanisms and novel therapeutic targets. Most recently, this has included studies of intergenerational and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Prof. Hannan has published >200 articles which have been cited >10,000 times (Google Scholar).
- Associate Professor Jill Lei
Department of Management and Marketing
Associate Professor Jill Lei
My research interests are mainly in the area of consumer decision making, especially how consumers make trade-off decisions in various contexts, such as food consumption and financial decisions.
- Associate Professor Shinsuke Suzuki
Brain, Mind and Markets Lab
Department of Finance
Associate Professor Shinsuke Suzuki
Shinsuke Suzuki is an Associate Professor in the Brain, Minds and Markets Laboratory in the Department of Finance in the Faculty of Business and Economics.
Shinsuke’s current research aim is to understand the neural and computational principles underlying human decision-making. To elucidate the computational and neural mechanisms, he employs a new neuroimaging method known as “model-based fMRI” that combines functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with computational modeling. In this approach, he constructs a quantitative computational model of a particular decision-making paradigm and applies this model to neuroimaging data in order to identify neural activity related to each of the specific computations in the decision-making process. He believes his studies involving model-based fMRI can provide significant insight into understanding the neural underpinnings of mental disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety and autism.
Prior to joining The University of Melbourne, Shinsuke was an Assistant Professor at the Tohoku University in Japan. He obtained his PhD in Economics from The University of Tsukuba in Japan in 2008. After that, he switched his research field to neuroscience and worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan and California Institute of Technology in USA.
Email
shinsuke.suzuki@unimelb.edu.au
Address
Room 12.036, The Spot, 198 Berkeley Street, Carlton
- Dr Elizabeth Bowman
Brain, Mind and Markets Lab
Department of Finance
Dr Elizabeth Bowman
Elizabeth Bowman is a Research Fellow in the Brain, Minds and Markets Laboratory in the Department of Finance in the Faculty of Business and Economics. Her current research looks at how variations in neurotransmitters may affect how people make complex optimisation decisions and decisions under risk and uncertainty. This includes pharmacological experiments in complex decision making, surveys of the use of pharmacology for attempted cognitive enhancement purposes, and investigations of how humans make predictions with regard to the frequency of outlier events under leptokurtic uncertainty.
With a background in magnetic resonance imaging, eye movements and optics, and retinal physiology, she graduated with a PhD in visual neuroscience from the University of Melbourne in 2013. Dr Bowman has previously worked with the Melbourne Brain Centre at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Bionic Vision Australia, and the University of Melbourne's Department of Optometry and Vision Sciences. She has also obtained a Bachelor of Science with Honours in neuroscience from the Australian National University.
Dr Bowman's current research interests include neuropharmacology, computational complexity, prediction errors, pupillometry and clinical trials.
Email
eabowman@unimelb.edu.au
Address
Level 12, The Spot, 198 Berkeley Street, Carlton
Phone
+61 3 9035 9950 - Dr Inbar Levy
Melbourne Law School
Dr Inbar Levy
Dr Inbar Levy completed her DPhil in Law at University College, Oxford. Her doctoral project, titled ‘Behavioural Analysis of Civil Procedure Rules’, written under the supervision of Professor Adrian Zuckerman, investigated the implications of findings derived from empirical behavioural psychology for legal reasoning and practice.
Inbar had been awarded a Joint Law and Psychology LLB with Magna Cum Laude honours and subsequently an LLM with similar honours from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before going to Oxford, she served as a legal advising officer in the Military Advocate General unit of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Inbar joined Melbourne Law School as a Lecturer in 2015, after a short period as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of Rationality and the Sacher Institute in Jerusalem. Her primary research areas are procedural justice and empirical legal research, with a particular interest in behaviour and decision-making, access to justice and institutional design.
Inbar has previously held a Visiting Research Fellow position at Columbia Law School in the City of New York and a Visiting Researcher position at Harvard Law School. And, most recently, a Houser Global Fellow position at NYU School of Law.
Email
inbar.levy@unimelb.edu.au
Address
Melbourne Law School, Room 0750
Phone
+61 3 8344 9341 - Dr Nicholas Van Dam
Decision-Making and Affective Learning in Emotional Conditions Laboratory (DALEC)
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
Dr Nicholas Van Dam
My research interests center on the use of cognitive neuroscience methods, decision science, and computational psychology/psychiatry to better understand and delineate high-prevalence symptoms across the spectrum from normal to pathological with a critical focus on value-based decision-making processes.
My primary translational research objective is to advance the understanding of the clinical phenomenology and neurobiology of mood and anxiety disorders, as well as discrete domains that are commonly observed among these conditions (e.g., suicidality, approach vs. avoidance behaviors). I aim to better understand these conditions (and the range of normal to abnormal behaviors that underpin them) through a combination of advanced psychometrics, experimental manipulation, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and computational modeling.
In addition to my goals to classify and predict these conditions, I am also interested in optimizing treatment and intervention approaches via identification of response likelihoods during the natural course of treatment (especially in the context of general clinical assessment, as well as pharmaco-therapy and psycho-therapy).
Email
nicholas.vandam@unimelb.edu.au
Location
Room 816, Redmond Barry Building, Parkville Campus
Address
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia
Phone
+61 03 8344 3644
Collaborators
- Dr Helen Dixon
Principal Research Fellow
Centre for Behavioural Research in Cancer
Cancer Council Victoria
Helen Dixon
Helen has been conducting behavioural research applied to cancer prevention and public health since the mid-1990’s. Her main area of research endeavour involves assessing adult’s and children’s responses to health-relevant media and communications, especially in relation to nutrition and obesity prevention. This work includes population surveys and experimental studies assessing consumer responses to public health campaigns, nutrition labelling interventions and commercial product marketing.
Helen regularly collaborates with Cancer Council’s Prevention Division, the Obesity Policy Coalition, and other external researchers and health educators involved in chronic disease prevention. She is an Honorary Principal Fellow in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at The University of Melbourne (where she earlier completed her PhD) and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at Curtin University.