Research Theme Champion: Health & Wellbeing

Associate Professor Gabrielle Weidemann

School of Psychology and
The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour & Development
g.weidemann@westernsydney.edu.au

Gabrielle Weidemann is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology and a member of the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development. She is an expert in associative learning and the role of associative learning in human experience. Gabrielle’s research has examined the role of associative learning in language acquisition, word learning, food seeking, substance use disorders, musical preferences, infant emotion recognition, object preference, decision making in older adults and processing of visual information. Gabrielle has examined associative learning across the lifespan from early infancy, amongst university students and into older adulthood, across specialist populations, such as individuals with obsessive-compulsive symptoms, with substance use problems and with different language experience, and across species including in rats, rabbits, and human participants. Gabrielle has been awarded more than a million dollars in research funding from the Australian Research Council in Discovery Project grants.

Gabrielle’s has worked on numerous interdisciplinary research projects with nursing academics, music cognition researchers, psycholinguists, sports scientists and researchers from the Science and Technology Group within the Department of Defence. This interdisciplinary research has attracted public sector funding from the Department of Defence and NSW Health. Gabrielle has recently embarked on some research projects working industry partners from the space industry and sports science.

In her role as Research Theme Champion, Gabrielle hopes to foster opportunities for early- and mid-career academics to work with industry partners and as part of interdisciplinary teams on research around health and wellbeing. The complexity and the broad scope of health and wellbeing affords opportunities for academics from diverse disciplines to work together to offer novel solutions to wicked problems.