Professor Julie Stout
Director of Research, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University
"Driving toward treatments for Huntington’s Disease: The story of a research movement"

Julie Stout is Professor and Director of Research in the School of Psychology and Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing, and Health Sciences at Monash. She came to Monash University in 2007 from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University in the US, where she held the Eleanor Cox Riggs Professorship of Social Science and Ethics. Professor Stout is a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist by training who works primarily as a clinical researcher.
She is Head of the Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, which is focussed on two main topics: 1) measurement of cognition for clinical trials, especially in Huntington’s disease; and, 2) cognitive models of decision making and their applications to clinical populations, especially substance use problems. The main methodologies used in her laboratory computerized cognitive, clinical neuropsychological, and neuropsychiatric assessment, along with mathematical modelling and neuroimaging (MRI, EEG). She has published over 90 papers and has had over $9 million of direct research funding over a 15 year academic career.

This talk will describe the momentum toward finding treatments for Huntington’s disease (HD). In particular, I will describe the overall program of international research including how basic and clinical researchers and people from the patient community have come together to identify strategies for bringing potential treatments to clinical trials. I will also profile the story of cognition in Huntington’s disease, including the research on this topic by my research group, and will describe the role of research developments in cognitive assessment for impending clinical trials in HD.

Theme: Mental Health & Neurosciences
Host: Dominic Thyagarajan