Associate Professor Justine Gatt

Associate Professor Justine Gatt is Director of the Centre for Wellbeing, Resilience and Recovery, Head of the Gatt Resilience Group at Neuroscience Research Australia and the School of Psychology UNSW, and is an External Fellow at the Black Dog Institute. She leads a research program that focuses on understanding the neuroscience of wellbeing and resilience to stress and trauma, and ways wellbeing and resilience can be promoted via various intervention platforms.

A/Prof Gatt received her PhD in Psychology at the University of Sydney in December 2005. She took up a postdoctoral research position at the Brain Dynamics Centre in the University of Sydney, with a focus on the genetic and brain markers of depression and anxiety. A/Prof Gatt has since pioneered a focus on understanding mental wellbeing, distress and resilience to trauma and stress. She has been successful in obtaining several competitive fellowships and grants to support diverse projects that span neuroscience to clinical translation. Her work includes leading longitudinal neuroimaging studies of adults and adolescents, twin studies (e.g., TWIN-E and TWIN-10), wellbeing program development for organisations (e.g., Thrive), wellbeing app development (e.g., ReNeuWell) and other trials in clinical and community groups. At the crux of her projects is the primary outcome measure of wellbeing using the COMPAS-W Wellbeing Scale (Gatt et al., 2014) which she has developed and validated in adults and adolescents from age 12 and above, and the COMPAS-KIDS and COMPAS-PARENTS Wellbeing scales for children aged 5 - 12 years and their parents.

A/Prof Gatt has also received a number of prizes and awards for her research including the UNSW Staff Award for Research Collaboration (2024), the Worldwide University Network (WUN) Success Story awarded to her WUN Resilience Research Group for ‘Exceptional Levels of Achievement’ (2019), the Commonwealth Health Minister's Award for Excellence in Medical Research (2014), the NHMRC Excellence Award for top-ranked CDF fellowship (2014), the Westmead Millennium Institute Science Prizes (2009 and 2010), and several other national/international travel awards from foremost professional societies.