Professor Dennis Velakoulis is a consultant neuropsychiatrist and director of the Neuropsychiatry Centre, Royal Melbourne Hospital. Following graduation from the University of Melbourne in Medicine, Professor Velakoulis completed a Diploma of Criminology before successfully completing his Fellowship for the RANZCP in 1994. He was then was appointed as an NHMRC Research Fellow at the Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, where he worked in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and began world-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 completed a Masters of Medicine in Neuroscience in 1997. In 2001, Professor Velakoulis was appointed Director of Neuropsychiatry at The Royal Melbourne Hospital and has led a multidisciplinary team providing clinical care to patients across the breadth of neuropsychiatry. In 2012 he successfully completed his doctoral thesis examining neuroimaging and neuropathological markers of brain changes in schizophrenia. Professor Velakoulis has published over 400 Medline-indexed scientific papers and been a chief investigator of numerous research grants.
