Rate My Professor Suraj Samtani

Dr Suraj Samtani is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Healthy Brain Ageing (CHeBA) at the University of New South Wales. He holds a Bachelor of Psychology with First Class Honours from the University of Sydney, a Master of Psychology (Clinical), and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from UNSW Sydney. His academic appointments include serving as Study Coordinator for the international SHARED project from 2019 to 2022, which examined social, biological, and psychological factors in dementia, and for the Sydney Memory and Ageing Study 2 in 2023. He was previously a Sessional Lecturer at NYU Sydney from 2015 to 2020, teaching courses on cognition, multicultural counselling, and child and adolescent brain development.

Dr Samtani’s research focuses on social connections, social cognition, and social determinants of health and mental health in older adults, with particular emphasis on identifying risk and protective factors for healthy ageing through meta-analyses of longitudinal cohorts and the development of interventions. He received a Dementia Australia Research Foundation Pilot Grant in 2020 to co-design a social cognitive skills intervention and a DARF Fellowship in 2022 valued at $405,000 over three years to conduct a randomised controlled trial of the intervention. In 2022, he was awarded the UNSW Medicine and Health Discipline of Psychiatry & Mental Health Early/Mid-Career Researcher Best Paper award. He maintains professional memberships with the Australian Psychological Society and the Australian Clinical Psychology Association and has contributed to numerous journal articles and a book chapter on topics including repetitive negative thinking and social health in neurocognitive disorders.