Research leaders

Alison Yung is Associate Director, Graduate Research at Orygen; Professor of Psychiatry and NHMRC Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Youth Mental Health, The University of Melbourne; and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Manchester. She has held positions as Professor and Consultant Psychiatrist at Orygen Research Centre and the Centre for Youth Mental Health. In 2012 she moved to take up a Professorship at the University of Manchester, UK. She returned to Melbourne in late 2018 to and now holds an NHMRC Principal Research Fellowship.

Alison has been researching the early stages of psychotic disorder since 1994. She established a specialized research-clinical service, the PACE Clinic, that manages young people at risk of developing a psychotic illness. The instrument she created to assess risk for psychosis, the Comprehensive Assessment of At Risk Mental States (CAARMS) has been translated into 18 languages and is used throughout the world, both for clinical and research purposes. She is also interested in exercise as an intervention for mental illnesses and in improving the physical health of people with mental disorders.

Alison received the Lilly Oration Award for prominence in psychiatric research in 2009, and the Richard J Wyatt Award in 2010, for exceptional contributions to the area of early intervention in psychosis. In 2014 and 2016 and she was named as one of the “world’s most influential scientific minds” by Thomson Reuters. She has over 350 publications and from 2016 to 2019 she was named as a “highly cited Researcher” by Clarivate Analytics.

In 2019 she was awarded the Founders' Medal by the Society for Mental Health Research, recognising her career achievements in research.