OUR SPEAKERS

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.