Research leaders

PhD

Dr Lianne Schmaal is Head of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Research program at Orygen.

Lianne’s research is focused on understanding why people develop depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts and behaviours and who is at risk for poor longer-term outcomes. Her team integrates clinical, psychosocial, neurobiological and genetic data using machine learning methods to develop prediction models for illness onset, treatment response and suicide attempts, and to identify subgroups of people within and across these disorders who have unique symptom or biological profiles.

Lianne leads the two largest neuroimaging consortia on depression and suicidal behaviours worldwide, i.e. the ENIGMA Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and the ENIGMA Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviours (STB) consortia. These international consortia pool neuroimaging and clinical data from >30,000 people from ~50 research institutes in 16 different countries worldwide.