Professor Murat Yucel MAPS
Distinguished Contribution to Psychological Science Award

Award type: Science 

Yücel is a Clinical Neuropsychologist appointed as a Professorial Fellow at Monash University.

He is the Founding Director of BrainPark and has held several appointments within the National Health and Medical Research Council fellowship schemes.

He has ~400 peer-reviewed publications, >35K citations to his work, and a h-index of 108 (GoogleScholar). He is also a Clarivate HiCi researcher (i.e., in the top 0.1% of most cited researchers globally), a merit that he has achieved in 6 of the past 8 years. 

Yücel's major contributions to research include:

• Attracting some of the largest philanthropic donations to mental health research in Australia.
• Creating BrainPark® - a unique research facility designed to develop novel neuroscience-, lifestyle- and technology-based therapeutics for mental and brain health.
• Charting the risk/benefit profile of long-term cannabis use on cognitive, mental and brain health.
• Identifying specific neurocognitive processes that cut across and drive to a range of mental health problems (i.e., are transdiagnostic).
• Inventing BrainPAC, a neuroscience-informed, expert-endorsed, psychometrically-validated, transdiagnostic and gamified digital tool for assessing cognitive performance and brain health.
• Creating a virtual-reality based exposure/response prevention platform for OCD that is now being adopted by clinics, and licensed by industry.
• Leading several trials of Lifestyle Medicine showing the efficacy of specific forms of physical exercise and meditation on mental and brain health. 

His work cuts across academia, healthcare, community, government, and industry.