Associate Professor Stephen Hearps is a Data Scientist/Biostatistician at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. His research focuses on analysis and translation of epidemiology and social and mental health outcomes of children and adolescents, primarily following paediatric illness/injury. Stephen’s expertise is in working with various complex datasets, including nuanced clinical data, large-scale longitudinal cohort studies, and global data repositories. His primary areas of research areas include paediatric brain injury/concussion, stroke, ED presentation, and mental health. He supervises several postgraduate students, assists visiting scholars, and mentors junior research staff in data management, analysis and research methodology.

AProf Hearps has published in over 160 peer-reviewed papers with 3000+ citations, and has accumulated $15 million in competitive research funds (NHMRC 1146635, and MRFF 1202073 and 2006438). He has contributed to the development and clinical application of the Amsterdam memory and attention training for children (Amat-c) intervention, and development and standardisation of a digital measure of social impairment (PEERS™, International Patent No. WO 2017/124130).

Stephen collaborates with national and international academic research groups, including The Royal Children’s Hospital, The University of Melbourne, Monash University, the PREDICT network, the Australian Football League and The Lancet Youth: The Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing. Stephen has a Bachelor of Psychology from the Australian Catholic University (2008), and a Master of Biostatistics from the University of Melbourne (2018). He is a Consulting Statistical Editor of the APA journal ‘Neuropsychology’.