Professor Jason Thompson appointed as University of Melbourne Academic Lead for the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing

Professor Jason Thompson has been appointed as the University of Melbourne Academic Lead of the Victorian Collaborative Centre for Mental Health and Wellbeing (Collaborative Centre) after an extensive selection process. The Collaborative Centre connects lived and living experience leadership, innovative service delivery and cutting-edge research to drive ground-breaking change to Victoria’s mental health and wellbeing system.

As Academic Lead, Professor Thompson and the inaugural Professor of Mental Health Reform, will shape the research direction of the centre that is a partnership between the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH) and 18 other consortium members. He will work closely with the University of Melbourne Consortium Program Coordinator and the Best Practice Partnership Lead, RMH and manage its research activities in partnership with people living with a mental illness and their carers.

Professor Thompson holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from Deakin University in 1997 and majored in Psychology; he completed a Master of Clinical Psychology at the University of Ballarat in 2005 and graduated with a PhD from the School of Medicine, Deakin University in 2015. Before academia, Professor Thompson worked in disability services, public health and as an applied researcher in government for almost two decades.

From 2011 to 2016 Professor Thompson led applied research at the Monash University Accident Research Centre and Institute for Safety, Compensation and Recovery Research (ISCRR), a major collaborative research partnership between Monash University, the Victorian Transport Accident Commission (TAC), and WorkSafe Victoria. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Professor Thompson led infectious disease and policy modelling alongside colleagues from MDHS that informed the Victorian Government and Department of Health’s strategy to exit the 2020 outbreak.

Nowadays his research is focused on the translation of research into practice in the areas of complex social policy, including health, disability, road trauma and injury compensation systems; areas in which he has published over 140 research papers and government reports in the past decade. Professor Thompson was an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (DECRA) Fellow, is a current Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and is a Chief Investigator on multiple National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC) projects.