Gershon Spitz

I am a senior research fellow and NHMRC Research Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health and Monash-Epworth Rehabilitation Research Centre.

My research largely centres around the following key objectives: 1) to understand the mechanisms that underlie cognitive and emotional disturbances that occur following traumatic brain injury. 2) to use established mechanistic understanding to develop novel interventions for emotional and cognitive and emotional disturbances following traumatic brain injury.

Traumatic brain injury is an alteration to brain function caused by an external force. Due to the relatively early age at the time of injury and subsequent cognitive and emotional changes, traumatic brain injury a global health concern. I have a particular interest in using structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the neural bases of cognitive and emotional changes following traumatic brain injury. 

In 2017, I was awarded an NHMRC early career fellowship. This fellowship allowed me to undertake research, from 2017-2020, at the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain, Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford. During this time, I obtained expertise in a) applying transcranial brain stimulation to remediate cognitive impairment following a stroke, b) application of computational modelling techniques to interrogate cognitive processes in stroke and anxiety, c) advanced implementation of functional MRI analysis.

My current focus is to integrate MRI and computational modelling to understand mechanisms underlying cognitive and emotional impairment on the individual level.