Associate Professor Justine Gatt

Adjunct Professor Justine Gatt is a neuroscientist and mental health researcher with over 20 years’ experience leading research on mental wellbeing, resilience, and recovery across the lifespan. Her work has been internationally recognised for advancing the neuroscience of mental wellbeing and resilience, and translating research into policy, practice, and scalable intervention platforms.

At UNSW, Prof Gatt has held senior academic and research leadership roles within the School of Psychology and Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), where she founded and led Australia’s first dedicated research program focused on the neuroscience of wellbeing and resilience, including leadership of the Centre for Wellbeing, Resilience and Recovery at NeuRA. She continues to supervise existing HDR students at UNSW and maintains active research collaborations arising from this body of work.

Prof Gatt is currently the Scientific Director of 18 and Up, a nationally significant longitudinal study of adult mental health and wellbeing involving more than 300,000 Australians, based at the Sax Institute. This role builds directly on her longstanding expertise in longitudinal cohort studies, population mental health, and research translation at scale.

She has authored more than 110 peer-reviewed publications, attracting over 7,500 citations, with four papers ranked in the top 1% globally in their field. She has secured over $15.7 million in competitive research funding and has supervised more than 51 research staff and students, including 33 HDR candidates. Prof Gatt is an experienced communicator, having delivered over 100 invited talks and featured in more than 55 media engagements, translating complex neuroscience research for academic, policy, industry, and community audiences.

Her research program has encompassed longitudinal neuroimaging studies of adults and adolescents, twin studies (including TWIN-E and TWIN-10), and the development and evaluation of wellbeing interventions across organisational, clinical, and community settings. Central to this work is the COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale (Gatt et al., 2014), which she developed and validated for adults and adolescents aged 12 years and over, alongside the COMPAS-KIDS and COMPAS-PARENTS scales for children aged 5–12 years and their parents (Lam et al., 2025).

Prof Gatt has received numerous awards recognising research excellence and impact, including the UNSW Staff Award for Research Collaboration (2024), the Worldwide University Network (WUN) Award for Exceptional Achievement (2019), the Commonwealth Health Minister’s Award for Excellence in Medical Research (2014), the NHMRC Excellence Award (2014), and the Westmead Millennium Institute Science Prizes (2009, 2010).