Meet the ANZ ACBS Board

I am a Senior Clinical Psychologist at the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) in Melbourne, with the Psychology Service, and the Neurodevelopment and Disability team. I support the psychological wellbeing of children and young people on their journey with a chronic illness or disability or following an injury, as well as providing both individual support to parents of hospital patients, in both individual and group settings. I also especially enjoy the opportunity to support the emotional wellbeing of medical teams, and demonstrate the value of psychology within the multidisciplinary approach. Alongside this, I am a board approved supervisor, regularly supervising postgraduate students and staff members in various teams across the hospital, as well as teaching into postgraduate psychology courses and presenting at national and international conferences on the use of ACT with a variety of populations. I also provide supervision to psychologists working in the community. Prior to these roles, I have worked in private practice, as well as in a number of research roles, including as a senior research fellow in the Complex Autism Team at Monash University, and the Suicide Prevention team at Orygen. I have extensive expertise in conducting Systematic Reviews, producing best practice guidelines, as well as holding editorial positions for both the Cochrane Collaboration and BMJ Pediatrics. I have a passion for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and more recently Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR), and finding ways to use these approaches flexibly with children, young people and parents.

Michael is a clinical psychologist and registered supervisor, working primarily at RMIT University as a student counsellor. He has been the facilitator of a Melbourne ACT Therapist peer consultation group since 2015. He is an organisers of the Melbourne ACT in the Pub event series, and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 ANZ ACBS Conferences. He is passionate about community-building and sharing ACT, CBS, and behaviourism. His clinical work has focused on tertiary student counselling with areas of special interest in neurodivergence, impostor syndrome, and trauma. His research has focused on the wellbeing and burnout of psychologists and other human service professionals, and recently on university staff and student experiences of psychosocial safety climate, as well as role engagement and exhaustion.

Vin is a PhD student at the University of Auckland in the department of Psychological Medicine. He and his team are currently working on a project to develop digital tools to support the delivery of Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (fACT) in New Zealand primary care contexts. He's a big fan of third-wave behavioural therapies such as ACT and fACT, and extending the use of these to solve population health problems is a primary focus of the team's research. Mental health research is one of Vin's passions, and he feels very lucky to be able to make a living out of doing research in this area. He's always been passionate about the philosophy of Behaviourism, and credit's B. F. Skinner’s Radical Behaviourism for initially sparked his interest in Relational Frame Theory, and subsequently Contextual Behavioural Sciences. These approaches underlie all of his research endeavours, and he's keen to be a part of a community of fellow CBS researchers.