Homeostatic dysregulation
The HDBD model treats mood stability as a homeostatic process — a capacity to restore equilibrium after perturbation — across neural, circadian and behavioural scales at once.
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Towards personalised psychiatry
Bipolar disorder needs a multi-scale, integrated theory.
MODE-BD (Multi-scale Oscillations, Dynamics & Emotion in Bipolar Disorder) builds an integrated, multi-scale model of bipolar disorder spanning neurons to behaviour, and turns that theory into individual digital twins that forecast mood transitions and treatment response — a step towards personalised psychiatry.
The University of MelbourneDepartment of Psychiatry
Northern HealthMental Health Services
Our approach
Theoretical models, built to predict
Most models of bipolar disorder describe a single level in isolation — a gene, a circuit, a symptom. MODE-BD develops integrated theoretical models that span multiple scales at once, and uses them to build digital twins: individually parameterised computational models of a patient's own mood dynamics, fitted to that person's data and tested on data they have never seen. The aim is to move from describing bipolar disorder to forecasting it, one patient at a time — the basis of a genuinely personalised psychiatry.
Three projects, one research vision
From integrated theory to individual-level prediction
Brain criticality
We test whether the bipolar brain sits further from the "critical" regime that gives the healthy brain its flexibility — lowering the threshold for mood-state transitions.
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Individually parameterised generative models of a patient's mood dynamics, built to forecast transitions before they happen — and to test whether they can be seen coming.
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Students & collaborators
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An interdisciplinary bench
We bring together computational neuroscience, biophysics, neuroimaging and clinical psychiatry, in partnership with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne and Mental Health Services at Northern Health.