Having gained his PhD in 2021, Dr Ney, from QUT's School of Psychology and Counselling, is ranked as the leading career researcher in Australia and the only ECR among the top 15 researchers globally in his field of Fear Conditioning and Anxiety Disorders, evidenced by rapid citation growth and a high-impact publication profile.
He leads a large QUT research team and received the Early/Mid-Career Researcher of the Year Award in 2025. In 2022, he was awarded the Biological Psychiatry Australian Early Career Plenary Award.
Recognised by the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy and other professional bodies, Dr Ney’s work is changing approaches to exposure therapies and advancing integration of psychological science to influence therapies in real-world clinical and community settings.
Dr Ney’s ground-breaking research is reshaping how psychological disorders are modelled and investigated by redefining experimental and clinical psychology and demonstrating critical limitations in the dominant fear conditioning paradigm used to model post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
PTSD is a treatment-resistant disorder with high relapse rates and substantial socio-economic costs for the person and the wider community whose treatment efficacy has been impaired by relying on incomplete experimental models.
Dr Ney’s research has challenged the stagnant foundational assumption that has underpinned decades of PTSD research by showing how intrusive memories (central to PTSD) are better explained by stimuli occurring during, rather than before, trauma.
This work has reversed the conventional research pipeline by using clinical theory to refine experimental design, an approach influencing emerging methodological standards, and better integrating basic and applied psychological science.
His insights have led to the development of more clinically valid experimental models and are driving a re-examination of how memory mechanisms are conceptualised in trauma research.
This research is informing real-world professional practice through collaborations with clinical psychologists and psychiatrists nationally and internationally, including partnerships with the ACU REFORGE Network which works to improve mental and physical health of military veterans and their families.
He has secured almost $7.5M in competitive funding, including an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellowship, ARC Discovery Project, and a Cooperative Research Centre Projects (CRC-P) grant.
His ability to communicate complex psychological science to diverse audiences has seen him speak at major national and international forums and serves on multiple journal editorial boards.
QUT Distinguished Professor Patsy Yates, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health said the award was well-deserved recognition for Dr Ney’s innovative research.
Dr Ney’s innovation approach to creating new ways to address mental health conditions that have a substantial impact on people’s lives.
“This award is well-deserved recognition for Dr Ney’s innovative approach to creating new ways to address mental health conditions that have a substantial impact on people’s lives,” Professor Yates said.
“His work is unique in its emphasis on developing real-world experimental approaches to produce results that can be more readily integrated into practice.”
07 3138 2361 or 0407 585 901, media@qut.edu.au
