Neurological Disorders

Associate Professor Ruth Peters uses clinical trials, evidence synthesis and observational studies to develop understanding of risk factors for cognitive decline, dementia and frailty and ways to reduce this risk.

Following the completion of her PhD at Imperial College London she was awarded a UK National Institute of Health Research Post-Doctoral Fellowship prior to moving to Australia in 2018. She has led numerous teams delivering high profile evidence synthesis work in the area of dementia and healthy ageing and has a particular interest in cardiovascular risk factors including hypertension. In particular, she was the dementia lead for the award winning multinational Hypertension in the Very Elderly Trial (HYVET, HYVET-COG) and both her work in hypertension and evidence synthesis are cited widely in the academic literature and by national, international and WHO clinical practice and health guidelines.

Associate Professor Justine Gatt is Head of the Gatt Resilience Group at UNSW and NeuRA, and Lead of the new Mental Wellbeing Centre at NeuRA. Since 2006, she has led a mental wellbeing and resilience research program that spans neuroscience through to clinical translation, including leadership of more than 15 neuroscience, longitudinal and randomised controlled trials in young people and adults.

Associate Professor Gatt obtained her PhD in Psychology at the University of Sydney in 2005, followed by postdoctoral research in psychiatric neuroscience at the Brain Dynamics Centre, University of Sydney. She has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications, including a book and three book chapters. In 2014, she developed and published the COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale, the first composite index of wellbeing, which has since been adopted in more than 30 research and clinical projects.

Her work has been recognised by multiple awards including the Commonwealth Health Minister’s Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Research, the NHMRC Excellence Award for Top Ranked Career Development Fellowship Applicant, and the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Success Story awarded to the WUN Resilience Group for Exceptional Levels of Achievement, for which Gatt was Lead Coordinator in a 6-site international trial in youth resilience.

Adith Mohan is a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI), Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, Australia. He is also a Research Fellow with the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA), and a Senior Lecturer with the School of Psychiatry, UNSW.

Dr Mohan’s research interests include novel pharmacological interventions in neuropsychiatry, the study of human brain transcriptome changes related to ageing, as well as therapeutic neuromodulation in neuropsychiatric disorders. He currently leads a clinical trial investigating the use of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in mild cognitive impairment and is involved in studies of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Tourette syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He is actively involved in the Section of Neuropsychiatry (SoN) of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, is the jurisdictional representative for the state of New South Wales on the SoN, and is involved in the development of a competency based training curriculum for Neuropsychiatry.

Professor James McAuley is a psychologist, Professor in the School of Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine and Health at UNSW and Senior Research Scientist at NeuRA.

James completed his PhD at Brunel University, London (2003). After immigrating to Australia in 2004 he took up a post-doctoral position at the University of Sydney and then at the George Institute for Global Health. In 2010 he moved to NeuRA where he set up the Centre for Pain IMPACT (investigating mechanisms of pain to advance clinical translation). In 2017 he was appointed as Associate Professor to the Exercise Physiology department at UNSW and in 2020 he was promoted to Professor.

Professor McAuley’s research combines experimental, clinical and translational methods to develop and test new interventions to manage low back pain. He has published more than 190 articles and holds more than $10 million in research funding. He is regularly invited to present at conferences and scientific meetings and has supervised 18 PhD students and mentored four post-doctoral researchers.

Professor McAuley is the chair of the back pain group of SPHERE MSK and is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) for the Australian and New Zealand Musculoskeletal Clinical Trials Network (ANZMUSC). In 2015 he founded the NSW network for pain PhD students/ECRs (SPRiNG).