OUR SPEAKERS
Meet the leading minds and voices shaping the future of mental health research in Australia and beyond.
Professor Colleen Loo
University of New South Wales, Australia
DR CONRAD IYEGBE
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
A/PROF ALEXIS WHITTON
Black Dog Institute, Australia
DR FIONA MCEWEN
King's College, United Kingdom
DR RAMA AGUNG-IGUSTI
The University of Western Australia, Australia
Professor Eva Loth
King's College, United Kingdom
Professor Colleen Loo
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 a clinical and research expert 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 is now also researching psychedelic assisted therapy. She has published over 350 peer reviewed papers and has received competitive grant funding from the Australian NHMRC, MRFF and major overseas grant funding agencies.
Dr Conrad Iyegbe
Dr Iyegbe has core training in genetics (PhD, King’s College London) and a more recent research focus on statistical methods development (Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, New York). As a Multi-Principal Investigator within the current Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) research program, he shares responsibility for advancing a research agenda that addresses the needs of psychiatric populations across Africa, while also nurturing the developmental aspirations of African scientists. This agenda includes conducting and supporting studies that harness pan-African genomic data to uncover factors that affect mental health.
Over the past two years, the Africa working group of the PGC has laid critical groundwork by creating practical tools, establishing shared resources and delivering targeted training programs. These foundational efforts (carried out through interdisciplinary collaborations, online platforms and in-person workshops) are designed to strengthen research capacity and foster innovation within the membership network. By providing training in advanced genomic methodologies, data analysis, and research design, the goal is to empower more African scientists to develop and lead high-impact research.
A/Prof Alexis Whitton
Dr Alexis Whitton is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Depression Treatment Precision, Head of the Precision Mental Health Team, and an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Black Dog Institute. A recognised leader in digital mental health innovation, Dr Whitton co-developed Australia’s first tailored smartphone-based tool for managing depression, now used by over 200,000 people. Her research harnesses artificial intelligence (AI), digital phenotyping, and large-scale data to redefine how we characterise and treat mood disorders. She currently leads Project Phonotype, a Wellcome Trust-funded, multi-country study involving over 10,000 young people, which uses advanced AI and mobile sensing to identify data-driven subtypes and mechanisms underlying individual differences in symptom expression and treatment response. Her research aims to enable more personalised, timely, and scalable digital interventions that can meaningfully improve mental health at the population level.
Dr Fiona McEwen
Dr Fiona McEwen's background is in developmental psychology, mental health, and neuroscience. She has a PhD in Psychology from King’s College London (KCL) and is currently based in the Department of War Studies (KCL), where she is the co-lead of the XCEPT programme, carrying out research in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and South Sudan. Her research focuses on mental health in war-affected and displaced populations, including evaluation of psychological interventions; how culture and the context of displacement impact assessment, treatment, and prognosis of mental health problems; and how the impact of trauma may influence further cycles of violence.
Dr Rama Agung-Igusti
Dr. Rama Agung-Igusti is a researcher with Balinese, Austrian and Scottish heritage living and working on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar. He is a research fellow with the Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing program based at UWA’s School of Indigenous Studies. His work is focussed on understanding how Indigenous understandings of health and wellbeing are translated into practice to support healing, empowerment and flourishing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities.
Professor Eva Loth
Eva Loth is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at King’s College London. Her research explores how social and biological factors shape social, cognitive, and emotional development in autistic and neurodivergent people. She is Deputy Lead of the AIMS-2-TRIALS consortium, which aims to advance precision medicine for autistic people and co-leads its biomarker programme across large, multi-site longitudinal cohorts from infancy to adulthood. Eva also leads RESPECT4Neurodevelopment, a UKRI Network Plus that brings together scientists, engineers, clinicians, and neurodivergent families to co-design responsible, reliable, scalable and personalised neurotechnologies for neurodivergent children. Her emerging work investigates how poverty-related adversities and protective factors influence neurodevelopment and mental health in South Africa.
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