Professor Chris Stapelberg has joined the Health Sciences & Medicine faculty as the Joint Chair in Mental Health for Bond University and Gold Coast University Hospital.
This key strategic position for both organisations will help grow the capacity for much needed Mental Health research for the broader Gold Coast community.
Professor Stapelberg is a senior staff specialist in psychiatry, working at the Gold Coast University Hospital as a consultation liaison psychiatrist. He is the Mental Health And Specialist Services Director Of Research, chair of the Gold Coast Hospital Mental Health And Specialist Services Research Committee and until recently was deputy chair of the Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service Research Council.
Professor Stapelberg was previously the Clinical Lead in Mental Health at the Griffith University School of Medicine, where he was involved with teaching, curriculum development, and examinations and received a number of teaching awards.
For the past eight years he has been researching major depression and has also undertaken work mapping the physiological network of relationships in depression and biomarkers in the context of major depression, notably heart rate variability.
Professor Stapelberg completed a PhD on the impact of depression on heart rate variability in people with, and without, coronary heart disease. He is now the principal investigator, or co-investigator, on a number of research projects in this area.
Since 2013 he has been an Invited Expert on depression for the Global Burden Of Disease Project with the World Health Organisation.
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