Andrew Zalesky is a Professor in Engineering and Medicine at the University of Melbourne. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering at the same institute in 2007. Adopting an engineering mindset to study the brain has enabled Prof Zalesky to innovate novel methods and models to understand the network organisation of the human connectome in health and disease. He established one of the most widely used tools for performing statistical inference on connectomes, co-authored the first textbook on brain network analysis and led development of the Melbourne Subcortex Atlas. A/Prof Zalesky is ranked among the top-1% of researchers worldwide according to citations to his work (2018-2021) and he was recently voted by his peers as one of Australia’s most innovative biomedical engineers.
He leads the Systems Group (www.sysneuro.org) at the University of Melbourne, a multidisciplinary group of engineers, neuroscientists and psychiatrists, who use neuroimaging and computational modelling techniques to study the human brain in health and mental illness. A/Prof Zalesky currently serves as an Associate Editor for Network Neuroscience, Brain Topography and Neuroimage Clinical.
Research
Prof Zalesky and team will use advanced brain imaging and computational modelling methods to map and understand the dysfunctional brain circuits responsible for psychiatric symptoms. He aims to conduct fundamental research to enable a new era of safe, high-tech psychiatric therapies based on electrical and magnetic brain stimulation techniques. This research is expected to improve treatment efficacy, and thus lead to better outcomes, relieve significant distress and improve quality of life for people with mental illness. The Foundation’s support will facilitate the establishment of world-leading capacity in multidisciplinary psychiatry research and provide outstanding research training opportunities for Australia’s next-generation of psychiatry and neuroscience researchers.