Professor Ben J. Harrison
Ben is Professor of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience; Deputy Head of the Department of Psychiatry; Co-Director of Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre.
+61 3 8344 1959
Ben received his PhD in 2006 and completed post-doctoral in Europe before returning to Melbourne in 2009. Since then, he has established the Depression and Anxiety Neuroscience program, which is dedicated to studying the brain basis of mood and anxiety disorders, with particular interest in treatment mechanisms. He has received multiple NHMRC fellowships and grants in support of this work and has published widely on these and related topics (200+ publications). He is recognised as a 'Dame Kate Campbell Fellow for Research Excellence’ at The University of Melbourne.
Current Projects & Funding
PI Harrison, NHMRC project grant: "A neural systems model of fear dysregulation in anxiety disorders"
PIs Felmingham, Harrison, Steward: “Neurobiology of attention, avoidance and self-appraisal”.
PI Harrison, NHMRC project grant: "A brain-based model of anxiety senstivity in panic disorder".
PI Davey, NHMRC project grant: "A randomised controlled trial of low-dose ketamine in youth with severe depression and elevated suicide risk".
PI Harrison, NHMRC fellowship: "Depression and anxiety neuroscience".
PI Harrison, NHMRC project grant: “Neural predictors of treatment response in youth depression”.
If you are interested in discussing these research projects please contact Ben directly at habj@unimelb.edu.au
Select Publications
Davey CG, Harrison BJ (2022) The self on its axis: a framework for understanding depression. Transl Psychiatry 12(1):23.
Harrison BJ, Davey CG, Savage HS, Jamieson AJ, Leonards CA, Moffat BA, Glarin RK, Steward T (2022) Dynamic subcortical modulators of human default mode network function. Cereb Cortex 32(19):4345–4355.
Battaglia S, Harrison BJ, Fullana MA (2022) Does the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex support fear learning, fear extinction or both? A commentary on subregional contributions. Mol Psychiatry 27(2):784–786.
Laing PAF, Steward T, Davey CG, Felmingham KL, Fullana MA, Vervliet B, Greaves MD, Moffat B, Glarin RK, Harrison BJ (2022) Cortico-Striatal Activity Characterizes Human Safety Learning via Pavlovian Conditioned Inhibition. J Neurosci 42(25):5047–5057.
Steward T, Kung PH, Davey CG, Moffat BA, Glarin RK, Jamieson AJ, Felmingham KL, Harrison BJ (2022) A thalamo-centric neural signature for restructuring negative self-beliefs. Mol Psychiatry 27(3):1611–1617.