Dr Jeggan Tiego is a National Health and Medical Research Council Emerging Research Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health and School of Psychological Sciences at Monash University. He leads the Behaviour research stream within the Neural Systems and Behaviour Research Lab, which aims to uncover the neurobiological basis of mental illness. His primary focus is using cutting-edge statistical techniques to build innovative models of mental health problems that optimise identification, treatment, and research of psychopathology. Dr Tiego also has a background in clinical neuropsychology, clinical neurophysiology, and behavioural neuroscience.

Dr Tiego is at the forefront of psychiatric nosology, cognitive psychology, psychiatric neuroimaging, and psychiatric genetics. In 2023. he led an international consortium of experts in developing a framework for optimising research of brain-behaviour and gene-behaviour relationships, published in the premier journal Nature Mental Health. He has also developed, or codeveloped, novel models of cognition, and shown that they far exceed existing models in explaining mental health symptoms, published as high-impact papers in journals, such as Nature Human Behaviour and Developmental Science. Dr Tiego is a member of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) Society, a group of 180 eminent psychopathologists and psychometricians from around the world developing the leading alternative to current, but limited, psychiatric classification systems, such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – Fifth Edition – Text Revised (DSM-5-TR), used for diagnosis, treatment, and research of mental illness.

The research achievements of Dr Tiego have been recognised with a 2-year Turner Impact Fellowship in Breakthrough Science, and an Excellence in Research Impact – Turner Institute Early Career Award from the School of Psychological Sciences at Monash University in 2021, and a highly competitive and prestigious 5-year Investigator Grant (2025 – 2029) from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

His current research interests include the broad fields of psychology, biological psychology, and cognitive and computational psychology. Specifically, extending and enhancing the HiTOP model, comparing whether it better predicts clinical outcomes than traditional DSM-5 diagnoses, and exploring its cognitive, genetic, and neurobiological substrates. Developing novel models of psychopathology, such as with structural equation modelling and gaussian graphical models, and identifying subtypes, using mixture modelling, and/or machine learning. Building novel and computational models of cognition and testing their relationship to psychopathology, genetics, and neurobiology. The purpose of pursuing these research areas is to improve the identification and treatment of mental health problems to promote improved health and wellbeing in the community.

Research Keywords: psychopathology; statistical modelling; cognitive psychology; psychiatric neuroimaging; psychiatric genetics;