Dr Barbara Barbosa Neves (PhD, FRSA) is an award-winning sociologist of technology and ageing. She is an internationally recognised expert on loneliness, social isolation, and digital inequalities among older people. 

Her expertise has been acknowledged via 24 prestigious awards, visiting positions (University of Oxford, University of Oslo, and UCLouvain), appointments to key committees (e.g., elected board member of the International Sociological Association – ISA/RC06 – since 2010), and speaking invitations. She has delivered 42 invited keynotes and 73 talks across five continents.

Barbara studies loneliness, isolation, and exclusion among older people living in care homes and alone. Her research also explores the role of AI, VR, and robotics for social connectedness in later life. This work has been used to improve technology design for frail older people and to inform care practices and policy in Canada, Portugal, and Australia.

Her studies have received several awards and honours in North America, Japan, Europe (UK, Belgium, Portugal), and Australia. For example, in 2022, she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK). In 2019, she was named by the ABC and University of Sydney among the ABC Top 5 Humanities and Social Science Scholars in Australia. In 2019, she was honoured with the annual Jacques Leclercq Chair (technology) at the University of Louvain, Belgium. 

Barbara has been awarded over $5M in competitive funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), European Union, Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF, NHMRC, Australia), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Networks of Centres of Excellence of Canada (NCE), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Australian Dept. of Health and Aged Care, Australian Dept of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Australian Dept. of Veterans' Affairs, among others. She has also secured several industry funding (aged care and technology).

Barbara has a background in sociology and human-computer interaction (computer science). Prior to moving to Australia, she was an Associate Director at the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada. She moved to the University of Melbourne in 2016 and to Monash University in 2019. 

She has published widely in top-tier journals/outlets in Social and Computer Sciences, including Sociology, CHI, CSCW, New Media & Society, Journal of Mixed Methods Research, The Gerontologist, The Sociological Review, Information Communication & Society, International Journal of Social Robotics, and PLOS One.

Barbara is a regular media commentator. Her work has been featured in media outlets in Australia, North America, Europe, Latin America & Asia. She has contributed to ABC, CBC, SBS, Channel 7, The Guardian, TVO, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, TVO, RTP, among others. She has penned over 10 op-eds, including for the ABC and The Conversation – for example: I spent five years speaking with people in nursing homes. This is what I learnt about loneliness and 'I tell everyone I love being on my own, but I hate it’: what older Australians want you to know about loneliness.

She was recently featured in the SBS documentary ‘What does Australia really think about old people?’, where she covered loneliness and ageism.

Further information can be found on her website.