Dr Dennis Velakoulis is a consultant neuropsychiatrist and director of the Neuropsychiatry Unit, Royal Melbourne Hospital and with Professor Chris Pantelis set up what is now the Neuroimaging Arm of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre. Following graduation from the University of Melbourne in Medicine, Dr Velakoulis completed a Diploma of Criminology before successfully completing his Fellowship for the RANZCP and a Masters of Medicine in Psychiatry in neuroimaging. Following this he was appointed an NH&MRC Fellow at the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, where he worked in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and began orld-leading research into the volumetric measurement of the hippocampus and other brain regions in schizophrenia, publishing in journals such as The Lancet and high-impact psychiatric journals including Archives of General Psychiatry. He has published over 100 Medline-indexed scientific papers. He continues to be involved in research into first-episode and established schizophrenia, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Huntington's disease and early-onset dementia.

dennis.velakoulis@mh.org.au

Dr Mark Walterfang graduated in medicine from University of Queensland with honours in 1993, and completed his Fellowship of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 2000. He then worked as a consultant psychiatrist at the Adult Mental Health Rehabilitation Unit at Sunshine Hospital and as a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital Neuropsychiatry Unit for two years. During this time he was appointed Academic Fellow at the University of Melbourne Department of Psychiatry. From 2003-2005 he was appointed as Senior Research Fellow at the Mental Health Research Institute, involved in neuroimaging research as part of a Stanley Foundation Centre Grant, and from 2006 has been a research fellow at the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre. Dr Walterfang has also been involved in the development in a number of clinical tools for use in psychiatric patients in the areas of cognition and behavioural observation, and their validation in a variety of medical, neurological and psychiatric settings since 2000. Dr Walterfang is currently completing a PhD in the neuroimaging of white matter in psychiatric disorders, particularly involving the corpus callosum, and the neuroimaging and neuropsychiatric investigation of rare metabolic disorders including chorea-acanthocytosis and Niemann-Pick disease type C. He continues to be involved in research in first-episode and established schizophrenia, neurodegenerative illnesses, and white matter disorders. He recently was invited to contribute a new chapter on the Neuropsychiatry of Neurometabolic and Neuroendocrine disorders to the world's most respected reference text in psychiatry, Kaplan and Sadock's "Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry".

mark.walterfang@mh.org.au

Dr Ramon Mocellin completed his medical training at the University of Melbourne in 1989. After completing a Master of Science in the Department of Medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital he had number of years experience as a registrar in neurology, general medicine and geriatric medicine. He obtained Fellowship of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 2004 whilst completing advanced training in Psychiatry of Old Age. In May 2004 he was appointed as the consultant psychiatrist for the Northern Aged Psychiatry Assessment and Treatment Team and as a consultant neuropsychiatrist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, where he is involved in consultation-liaison neuropsychiatry, the RMH Comprehensive Epilepsy Programme, and outpatient neuropsychiatry. Dr Mocellin has an interest in neuropsychiatric disorders of old age, dementia and epilepsy. He is currently involved in the development of an outpatient service at the Neuropsychiatry Unit for patients with early-onset dementia. He has published in areas of investigation-negative encephalopathies, hallucinatory phenomena, and auto-immune CNS states.

ramon.mocellin@mh.org.au

Sophie Adams is a Consultation Liaison and Neuropsychiatrist working in general consultation-liaison psychiatry and in liaison with the Comprehensive Epilepsy Programme and brain tumor oncology services at Royal Melbourne Hospital.  She is also a Research Fellow of the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre. Sophie graduated from the University of Melbourne in Medicine in 1997 and completed her internship at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. She subsequently worked as a psychiatric registrar in Ireland at St Brendan's Hospital in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland Psychiatric training scheme before returning to Melbourne to complete her psychiatric training through the North Western Mental Health Service. She obtained her Masters of Bioethics at Monash University in 2001. She has previously done research in cognitive testing in multiple sclerosis and is now completing her Phd at The University of Melbourne on hippocampal morphometry in psychiatric morbidities of epilepsy with Dr Dennis Velakoulis and Associate Professor Terence O'Brien.

sophia.adams@mh.org.au

Dr Colin Singam completed his medical degree at the University of Western Australia in 1999 and commenced training with the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 2005. Since that time he has worked in General Adult, Consultation-liaison, Perinatal, Child and Adolescent, Rural, Aged and Private Psychiatry. He has practised psychiatry in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia and has interests in psychotherapy, schizophrenia and cognitive disorders.

colin.singam@mh.org.au

Dr Chris Turnbull completed his medical degree at Otago University in New Zealand, attending the Dunedin and then Christchurch schools of medicine. He also completed a Batchelor of Medical Science in Biochemistry in Dunedin. He worked as a junior doctor in Christchurch and Dunedin hospitals for two years before starting training as a Psychiatry Registrar in Dunedin. After four and a half years Psychiatric training in Dunedin, he moved to Melbourne to gain experience in Neuropsychiatry. In addition to his BMedSc he has been involved in various research projects including laboratory neurophysiology, cellular biochemistry, and most recently on clinical outcomes of compulsory community treatment of mental disorders. He has long-term interests in the neurophysiological correlates of consciousnous and experience, and in bioethics.

chris.turnbull@mh.org.au

Dr Oscar Alvarez graduated in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Salamanca (Spain) in 1996. Subsequently he completed the training leading to the specialty of Family and Community Medicine in Barcelona, Spain. After working as a General Practitioner in Spain and Ireland he enroled in the Mater UCD Psychiatry training program in Ireland. During this period he worked in the areas of General Adult Psychiatry, Child and adolescents Psychiatry and Consultation and Liasion. He also worked for a period of 6 months in specialist service for Pervasive Developmental Disorders (Autism). In 2005 he emigrated to Australia to continue his training at ORYGEN a centre for early detection and intervention of psychosis and other mental health problems in adolescents, and worked in 2007 and 2008 in the Consultation-Liaison Neuropsychiatry and Epilepsy Fellow Position in NU. In the last 4 years he has had also ongoing training and practiced CAT (Cognitive Analytic Therapy) in various settings including the treatment of Borderline Personality Disorders. His main interests are the interface between body and mind (Psychosomatic medicine, Neuropsychiatry), Psychotherapy, Personality Disorders, Developmental Psychology and Conscioussness studies. Dr Alvarez takes on the new role in the NU in mid-2009, funded under the Expanded Specialist Training Program (ETSP) by the Commonwealth Government of Australia.

oscar.alvarez@mh.org.au