Rate My Professor Susanne Schweizer

Associate Professor Susanne Schweizer is a Scientia Fellow and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, where she leads the Developmental Affective Science Lab. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar, an MSc in Research and Clinical Masters in Psychopathology from Maastricht University, and a BSc Honours in Psychology from Tilburg University. Her previous appointments include Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the University of Cambridge Department of Psychology and the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, as well as Research Fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

Schweizer investigates cognitive, social, and affective processes underlying the development and maintenance of mental health problems including depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder across the lifespan, emphasizing adolescence and the perinatal period. Her research encompasses affective control, emotional working memory, intolerance of uncertainty, emotion regulation, and social rejection sensitivity, with a translational focus on interventions such as emotional working memory training for PTSD, depression, social anxiety, and borderline personality disorder, and gamified apps like Social Brain Train. Notable publications include 'Training the Emotional Brain: Improving Affective Control through Emotional Working Memory Training' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2013), 'Uncertainty as a driver of the youth mental health crisis' (Current Opinion in Psychology, 2023), and 'Perinatal intrusions: A window into perinatal anxiety disorders' (Science Advances, 2025). With over 17,000 Google Scholar citations, her work influences developmental cognitive neuroscience and clinical interventions, including contributions to the Future Proofing Study, a cluster-randomized controlled trial for preventing adolescent depression.