Meet the Professors – 2 July

Image - Meet the Professors – 2 July
Event date :
Tuesday, July 2, 2019 - 15:30 to 16:30
Event Type :
Seminar
Categories
Location :
Council Chambers, Chancellery Building
Open to :
Public
Number of seats available :
150
Booking deadline: 

Description

The 2019 Meet the Professors series is a wonderful chance for students and staff to celebrate the careers and achievements of our newly promoted and recruited professors. Our speakers will share their specialist knowledge and provide insights into ‘what’ and ‘who’ influenced their lives and careers.


Professor Philip Ward, School of Psychiatry, UNSW Medicine

Professor Ward is a clinical neuroscientist who completed his PhD in Psychiatry in 1990 at UNSW. He was appointed director of the Schizophrenia Research Unit, based at Liverpool Hospital, in 2000. Over the past eight years he has led evaluation of lifestyle and lifestyle programs to address premature mortality in people living with mental illness. In the last three years he co-directed a multi-national validation study of a new self-report measure of physical activity targeting people living with mental illness. He is currently leading the Obumu project in rural Uganda, to help address the impact of non-communicable disease in a low-resource setting.

Lecture: All together now – linking body and mind for people living with mental illness

For too long treatment of mental illness has focused on treating psychiatric symptoms whilst failing to address the physical health impairments that people living with mental illness frequently experience. This has led to significantly greater mortality and morbidity resulting in major reductions in life expectancy for this vulnerable population. There is now clear evidence that lifestyle interventions are effective in addressing this major health disparity. The challenge now lies in ensuring that these interventions are implemented as part of routine care, in both well-resourced high-income settings and the developing world. This lecture will highlight both recent advances, and the road ahead.

Please see Professor Philip Ward webpage HERE
 


Professor Melissa Green, School of Psychiatry, UNSW Medicine

Melissa Green is Professor of Psychiatry at UNSW, with honorary affiliations at Neuroscience Research Australia and the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition in the Netherlands. She completed her PhD in 2002 at the University of Sydney, and was awarded an NHMRC fellowship for postdoctoral research at the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, before moving to UNSW in 2006. She has obtained more than $32M in funding over the course of her career for multidisciplinary research in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, genetics, and epidemiology, with a primary aim to understand the cause/s of psychotic disorders.

Lecture: The Natural Way of Madness

Mental illness, like most human conditions, is believed to arise from a combination of genes and environment. Indeed, dominant causal models have long assumed that inherited genetic risk for ‘madness’ lies dormant until triggered by later experience/s. However, this way of thinking is now challenged by increasing evidence that genetic variants conferring risk for major mental disorders may be better understood as those which make us more sensitive to the environment: that is, under optimal conditions, key genetic variants associated with mental disorders may actually give rise to adaptive functioning. On this view, madness might be seen as a natural response to adverse environmental exposures, reflecting the very individual differences that make us human.

Please see Professor Melissa Green webpage HERE


PLEASE CHECK HOW TO ARRIVE TO THE VENUE

Location: The Chancellery, Council Chambers (C22), UNSW Sydney, Kensington.

Please see the UNSW Map here and Google map (The nearest entrance is Gate 9 off High St, and the nearest building is the Sir John Clancy Auditorium)

For more Information on how to get to UNSW please click here.

Cost
Free

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