Kelsey Perrykkad is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Women's and Children's Mental Health, Psychiatry Department, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University, located at Monash Medical Centre. In this role, Dr. Perrykkad investigates perinatal mental health and child outcomes using longitudinal datasets.

Her PhD, entitled "Self in Autism: A Predictive Perspective" was conferred in mid-2021 by the Monash Philosophy Department in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies. This work applied the predictive processing framework to understanding self-cognition in autism spectrum conditions.

Dr. Perrykkad has an interdisciplinary background, working between fields including cognitive science (including psychology and neuroscience), philosophy and education. Her work uses both theoretical and empirical methods to answer questions about:

• the relations between mental health and cognitive processes
• the nature of the self
• how our brains deal with environmental uncertainty
• how we act in the world and process the consequences of our actions

Dr. Perrykkad previously worked at the Queensland Brain Institute as a Senior Research Assistant and EEG lab manager. There, she studied the sense of agency, the intersection between education and neuroscience in real classrooms and neural correlates of motor preparation in naturalistic movements. She also worked for the Autism Cooperative Research Center as a Senior Research Officer under the Classroom Acoustics Project, which tested the efficacy of sound field systems for improving the classroom environment for autistic and allistic children. She has also worked as a research assistant at Occidental College, where she helped develop novel pedagogical methods and worked on a project about the ethical, social and legal implications of the human genome project.

Previously, Dr. Perrykkad has lectured and coordinated the "Critical Thinking: How to analyse arguments and improve your reasoning skills" unit at Monash University, winning a Dean's Sessional Teaching Commendation for her work in 2020. She has also been on the teaching staff for the "Philosophy of Mind" and "Time, Self and Mind" units, and guest lectured in the "Neural basis of Consciousness" unit.