When: June 14th-15th 2023 (with pre-conference workshops on June 13th)
Where: National Wine Centre, Adelaide

Conference convenors: Stephanie Wong, Irina Baetu & Mark Kohler

Local Organising Committee: Isabella Bower, Amy Jarvis, Hannah Keage, Tobias Loetscher, Isaac Saywell & Elysia Sokolenko

Speakers

Professor Helene Fung

Helene H. Fung is a Professor and the Chairperson of the Dept of Psychology, the Executive Director of the Centre for Positive Social Science and a Deputy Director of the Institute of Ageing, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. She obtained her BS from University of Washington, Seattle, and MA and PhD from Stanford University.

Professor Fung examines socioemotional ageing across cultures. Among her awards include the 2017-18 Anne E. Ofstedal Fellowship on Higher Education Leadership, offered by United Board, the 2010 Margret and Paul Baltes award in Behavioral and Social Gerontology from the Gerontological Society of America, the 2008 Retirement Research Foundation Mentor Award from Division 20 and the 2016 Henry David International Mentoring Award from Division 52, American Psychological Association. Her students have won international awards, including the Fulbright Junior Scholar award (2007 and 2011), and several research awards offered by the American Psychological Association and the Gerontological Society of America.

She is a senior associate editor for the Australian Journal of Psychology, and an associate editor for Cognition and Emotion. She has been an associate editor for Acta Psychologica Sinica. She was elected a fellow of the Association for the Psychological Science, a fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 20 & 52), and a fellow and Member-at-large of the Behavioral and Social Science Division of the Gerontological Society of America.

Professor Ottmar Lipp

Ottmar Lipp is a Professor in the School of Psychology and Counselling at Queensland University of Technology, where he currently leads the Emotion, Learning and Psychophysiology Laboratory. His research is concerned with the processes that govern emotional learning and the manner in which we process facial expressions of emotion.

Professor Lipp completed his PhD at the University of Giessen, Germany, in 1989, following which he joined the School of Psychology, University of Queensland as a post-doctoral researcher funded by the German Research Council (1990-91) and a University of Queensland Research Fellowship (1992-93). He was a member of academic staff in the School of Psychology, University of Queensland, from 1994 till 2014, holding an ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship (2006-2011) and a UQ Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowship (2012-2013), and serving as the Director of the ARC Special Research Initiative: A Science of Learning Research Centre (2012-2014). In 2014, he joined Curtin University as a Research Professor in the School of Psychology and a John Curtin Distinguished Professor in 2018, before returning to Brisbane in 2020.

Professor Robyn Young

Robyn Young’s interest in autism began while studying savants as part of her PhD in Savant Syndrome in 1992. This work became the subject of an ABC documentary titled Uncommon Genius. She went on to develop a screening tool for Autistic Disorder suitable for use in children as young as 12 months of age. This tool, known as the Autism Detection in Early Childhood (Young, 2007, 2022), clearly operationalises early behaviours indicative of Autism Spectrum Disorder (autism). Together with colleagues at Flinders University she has developed an intervention program for autistic children called SPECTRA (Young, Partington & Goren, 2009).  Her continued work in the forensic arena and the interaction between autistic people in the criminal judicial system led to the book Crime and autism spectrum disorder: Myths and mechanisms (Brewer & Young, 2015).  This book systematically reviews the literature related to autism and crime as well as introducing some of her own case studies.  She has also published a book on preparing autistic children for school Ready, Set, Learn. (Moffat & Young, 2017).

Professor Young has prepared more than 60 reports for court where persons with autism have been involved either as victims or perpetrators of crime.   She has appeared in court as an expert witness in South Australia on more than 15 occasions and twice in New South Wales.  She works in private practice 2 days a month as an autism diagnostician.  She is currently also an autism diagnostician trainer. She has appeared as a keynote speaker in numerous autism conferences  throughout the world (USA, Mexico, Europe, Hong Kong, China) and has written more than 80 journal articles related to autism.  Interest areas include autism and crime, autism and eating disorders, autism and trauma and autism and the female presentation.  She currently serves on the Professional Advisory Board Of Autism SA and has recently been elected to the Australia Autism Advisory Board.   Her expert opinion is often sought through the media.  She is also currently Head of Discipline in the School of Psychology at Flinders University where she is involved in research, teaching and postgraduate supervision.

Associate Professor Trevor Chong

A/Prof Trevor Chong is a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist currently appointed as an ARC Future Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University. He leads the Monash Cognitive Neurology Laboratory, which aims to understand the neurobiology of learning, memory and decision-making in health and neurological disease. His lab adopts a multidisciplinary approach to achieve this goal, by integrating novel experimental paradigms with computational models of behaviour, functional neuroimaging and pharmacointervention. A/Prof Chong complements these more fundamental questions in cognitive neuroscience with clinical and translational work in neurodegenerative disease. He is a senior staff specialist at St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne and Alfred Health; Chair of the Dementia Committee of a large clinical trial examining cognitive health in the elderly (STAREE); and Chair of Research at the FightMND Foundation. His research has been supported by fellowships and project funding by the NHMRC, ARC and multiple philanthropic schemes. The quality of his work was recently recognised by the Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society when they awarded him the Young Investigator Award for 2022.