Speaker: Professor Murat Yücel

David Winston Turner Chair in Addiction and Mental Health,
Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences

Australians have some of the highest rates of addiction-related problems in the world. Treatment services are often over-stretched, inaccessible, or ineffective. At the same time, revolutionary neuroscientific discoveries have revealed how lifestyle and technological interventions can improve brain health and psychological wellbeing. While these discoveries hold enormous therapeutic promise, we have done a poor job of integrating them into practice.

In this talk, Professor Murat Yücel will reveal how at the recently established BrainPark (Monash University), researchers are working to bring transformational changes to how addictions and compulsions are experienced, diagnosed and treated.

BrainPark brings together some of the nation’s best neuroscientists, mental health experts, exercise physiologists, behavioural interventionists, biomedical engineers, technology developers, data analysts, business strategists, and neuroethicists. Learn how researchers and their industry, healthcare and community partners are working to create a world-first convergence of advanced technologies (brain imaging, virtual-reality, brain stimulation, neuro/bio-feedback, wearables) and lifestyle activities (physical exercise, brain training, mindfulness).

Join us, as Professor Yücel discusses how he and his colleagues at BrainPark utilise the latest knowledge in brain sciences to develop lifestyle and technology-based interventions to help those experiencing substance and behavioural addictions (e.g., alcohol and gambling) and other compulsive conditions (e.g., OCD), and to measure the underlying psychological drivers of addictive behaviours that place individuals at risk of developing and/or maintaining those behaviours.

About the speaker:

Professor Murat Yücel has a PhD combined with specialist clinical training in Clinical Neuropsychology. He is an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, the David Winston Turner Chair in Addiction and Mental Health, and he currently leads the Addiction and Mental Health research program within the Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences.

His research group combines lifestyle, psychological and technology-based interventions to improve outcomes for people with (or at the borders of) addictions and obsessive-compulsive disorder. In 2018 Professor Yücel established BrainPark, a world-first research facility using neuroscience to create healthy habits, brains and lifestyle, and to fast-track knowledge into the community.