Dr Trevor Chong

Trevor is a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist based at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Monash and directs the Monash Cognitive Neurology Laboratory.

He completed his undergraduate research and medical degrees at Monash, before undertaking doctoral training at the University of Melbourne and MIT. After completing his PhD in 2007, he returned to specialty training in neurology at St Vincent’ Hospital and The Alfred Hospital and was admitted to Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians as a consultant neurologist. He was awarded an NHMRC Neil Hamilton Fairley Early Career Fellowship which he took to Oxford, and he is currently supported by an ARC DECRA Fellowship.

His lab seeks to understand the neurobiology of learning, memory and decision-making in healthy individuals, and how these processes are impacted by neurological illness. Their research bridges the domains of basic cognitive neuroscience and clinical cognitive neurology – with an ultimate goal to develop new paradigms that can be translated into the clinical setting to guide diagnosis and management of cognitive symptoms.

They combine insights from psychology, economics and neuroscience and apply cross-disciplinary methodologies that include: psychophysics, structural and functional brain imaging, computational modelling, electroencephalography and brain lesion studies.

Trevor leads research programs supported by organisations including the National Health and Medical Research Council, and the Australian Research Council. He consults at cognitive clinics at St Vincent’s Hospital and Alfred Health in Melbourne. He also chairs the research committee of the FightMND Foundation, and is involved in several international clinical trials.

Why does consciousness research matter?

An understanding of consciousness, and the mechanisms that create our experience of the world and our place within it, is more important than ever before. Significant to our everyday lives, consciousness research has far reaching implications for: