Dr Michelle Lim is the inaugural Chairperson and Scientific Chair of Ending Loneliness Together. She is considered the leading Australian scientific expert in loneliness, with more than 80 national media appearances to date. Dr Lim is a Research Fellow at the Iverson Health Innovation Research Institute and Centre for Mental Health at Swinburne University of Technology. She is the Director of the Social Health and Wellbeing (SHAW) Laboratory which generates evidence-based research in loneliness. Her research involves understanding the drivers of loneliness over time, and developing consumer-relevant and effective digital interventions to reduce loneliness. Dr Lim is also a practising clinical psychologist.

Professor Lisa Brophy is discipline lead in Social Work and Social Policy at La Trobe University. She is also an honorary principal research fellow in the Centre for Mental Health in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. Her research focus has been on people experiencing mental illness and psychosocial disability and their recovery, social inclusion and human rights. Professor Brophy’s work has fostered strong interdisciplinary partnerships, including people with lived experience and partner organisations, working in collaborative research teams with academics from a range of disciplines across Australia and internationally.

Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, and the head of the Social Neuroscience laboratory. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the Social Health and Wellbeing Laboratory at the Iverson Health Innovation Institute at Swinburne University of Technology. Dr. Holt-Lunstad’s research is focused on understanding the long-term health effects, biological mechanisms, and effective strategies to mitigate risk and promote protection associated with social connection. Her work has been seminal in the recognition of social isolation and loneliness as risk factors for early mortality. She serves as a scientific advisor and consultant for organizations across sectors aimed at addressing this issue. This includes the Coalition to End Social Isolation and Loneliness. Her work is regularly featured in major media outlets and has helped bring international attention to social isolation and loneliness.

Professor Ben Smith is Professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney. His early professional career was in community work and health program management, and since commencing in an academic role in the early 2000s the focus of his research has been building evidence for effective and sustainable prevention strategies. Professor Smith has collaborated with many government and non-government agencies in Australia in projects to address chronic disease, health behaviour, community engagement and health equity. A focus of his current work is the impact of loneliness and social networks on health behaviours and well-being, and the evaluation of strategies to address these needs.

Professor Cathy Mihalopoulos is Head of the inaugural Health Economics Division at Monash University, one of the largest groups of health economists in Australia specialising in the economics of mental health and psychosocial care, consisting of staff funded entirely on research income. She is nationally and internationally recognised for her expertise in the use of economic evaluation techniques (both within trial and modelled), particularly within the context of mental health. She has over 180 publications and has been an investigator on grants totalling more than $70M.  She has been invited to sit on committees of national and international significance, including the Economics Sub-Committee of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) and sits on the Executive Committee of the Society for Mental Health Research.

Dr Lidia Engel is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Monash University, based within the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine. As a health economist by training, she specialised in the measurement and valuation of quality of life and informal care, as well as the economics of mental health and ageing. Most recently, her work has focused on the economics of loneliness, establishing further evidence around the cost of loneliness and the economic credentials of interventions that aim to alleviate loneliness in older adults. Dr Engel is co-supervising a PhD student on the topic of The Economics of Loneliness and Social Isolation in an Ageing Population in Australia

Catherine Haslam is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Queensland and the Director of SIGNify which aims translate the research of the Social Identity Groups Network to practice. She is a clinical academic whose work focuses on the social and cognitive impacts of identity-changing life transitions (associated with trauma, illness and recovery, retirement, aging) and interventions that can be used to manage these. In particular, her research on social connectedness, health and well-being has contributed to a body of work on the social cure that has informed a series of identity building social group interventions to tackle loneliness.

Sarah Wright is an Associate Professor at the University of Canterbury Business School in New Zealand. Her early professional career was in organisational psychology working for national and international consulting firms. Since becoming an academic her work has focussed on loneliness in organisational contexts and relationship quality. Her current research focuses on understanding the lived experience of loneliness whilst in the company of others, particularly in a busy work environment, and understanding ways to improve relationship quality in organisations. Associate Professor Wright is a research advisor to the Loneliness NZ Charitable Trust, and the ‘Let’s End Loneliness’ campaign in New Zealand.

Professor Alex Brown is the Aboriginal Health Equity Theme Leader at South Australia Health and Medical Institute and Professor of Medicine at the University of Adelaide. Professor Brown is an internationally leading Aboriginal clinician and researcher, who focuses on in the provision of public health services, infectious diseases and chronic disease care, health care policy and research. Much of his research work has been focused on the difficult interface of geographical isolation, complex cultural context, severe socioeconomic disadvantage, inequitable access to and receipt of care and profound health disparities. His transdisciplinary program of research focuses on documenting the burden and contributors to health inequality in Indigenous Australians, with a primary focus on cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes, and cancer.

Professor Manuela Barreto is Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Exeter in England.  Her research spans many topics with the common interest being marginalization and social relationships. She has worked on various forms of stigmatization, for example, and continues to examine how these affect social relationships across various contexts. Her work on loneliness is particularly focused on going beyond individual(istic) approaches to the problem and its possible solutions to appropriately acknowledge the context in which loneliness emerges. She is also interested in expanding knowledge acquired with samples dominated by white middle class participants in western contexts and therefore researches populations that are less often heard.

Professor Pamela Qualter is the UK’s leading scientific expert on child and adolescent loneliness.  She works with the UK Government’s Tackling Loneliness Team, recently being commissioned by them to write an evidence gap report on loneliness. Previously, Pamela led the BBC Loneliness Experiment, then the world’s largest study of loneliness. Pamela has received extensive funding from several sources to examine loneliness, and is currently working on a Medical Research Council funded grant focused on the development of a new measure of loneliness for youth, and a randomized control evaluation of an intervention designed for primary school aged children in the UK funded by the Kavli Trust. She is also working on a project, funded by the UKRI, that includes the development of a social media measure that offers better exploration of the role of social media in the emotional and social lives of young people. Pamela has a consistent track record with publications exploring the phenomenon of loneliness among youth, and more recently has explored the role of place in the experience of loneliness among youth, using the socio-ecological framework. Pamela sits on several advisory and steering groups, including the WHO Scientific Advisory Group, mapping the evidence for interventions to mitigate social isolation and loneliness, the UK’s Emerging Minds UKRI Network, and the Mary Foundation, Copenhagen, Denmark (2011-current). She is also a member of the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection, advising on youth loneliness. Pamela’s expertise involves large longitudinal studies, where she has explored the causes and consequences of loneliness, and the individual differences in the prospective profile of loneliness across the life-course. Pamela has also used experimental and observational methods to examine key aspects of loneliness, including impacts on health, aiming to understand what keeps people stuck in loneliness.