Clinical psychologist · Developmental researcher · RMIT University
I study how growing up now happens partly online, and why the same digital experience can help one young person, leave another unchanged, and harm a third. The work combines clinical experience, large longitudinal cohorts, careful measurement and, where it earns its place, machine learning.
The work
In 2009 I was working in a dual-diagnosis drug rehabilitation unit in Greece. Some of the adolescents who had stopped using substances began spending long hours in online games instead. Was the gaming a new problem, a way of coping, or something else? The clinic could not answer that. It became a research question, and in many ways it still is.
My early research in Athens, with Frosso Motti-Stefanidi and the AStRA cohort, followed adolescents over time and asked how individual traits and the classroom around them shaped problematic internet use. The answer was rarely simple. Risk depended on the person, their context and their stage of development, and it changed as they grew.
After moving to Australia in 2013, three years of full-time clinical work, including Youth Justice in South Australia, kept that complexity in view. Since returning to research in 2016, the programme has widened from gaming to social media, from single samples to international birth cohorts, and from questionnaires to brain imaging and digital traces. I still practise as a clinical psychologist.
National and Kapodistrian University of AthensBSc (Hons) in Psychology, then MSc in Clinical Psychology.
GreeceClinical work in adolescent dual-diagnosis rehabilitation. The first sign that digital worlds were entering young people's development.
National and Kapodistrian University of AthensPhD in Clinical Psychology, funded by a competitive European Social Fund Heraclitus II award.
AustraliaInternational relocation and full-time clinical practice, including Youth Justice in South Australia.
Federation University AustraliaReturn to research as Senior Lecturer in Psychology, and the start of the Gaming Research Group.
Cairnmillar Institute, MelbourneSenior Lecturer, School of Psychology.
Victoria UniversitySenior Lecturer, College of Health and Biomedicine. From 2021, an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE210101107) made the work research-only.
The Cyber-Developmental FrameworkPublished in European Psychologist: digital context treated as part of development, not an add-on to it.
RMIT University, MelbourneAssociate Professor of Clinical Psychology, School of Health and Biomedical Sciences.
RMIT UniversityAssociate Dean, Higher Degree by Research, for a research-degree community of more than 200 candidates across 11 disciplines.
Research
Why, when and for whom does digital engagement help young people grow, and when does it begin to harm?
How do person, context, digital environment and developmental stage interact over time?
The Cyber-Developmental Framework treats online life as part of the setting in which children grow. My longitudinal work showed, for example, that problematic internet use often declines in mid-adolescence and that classroom context changes individual risk.
Which developmental paths lead to harm, and which to resilience?
I work with long-running cohorts from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and Greece, using growth, mixture and person-centred models to separate stable differences between people from change within them.
Does a symptom of gaming or social-media addiction mean the same thing across countries, ages and groups?
Invariance testing and item response theory for widely used scales, so that comparisons across cultures and across time rest on measures that hold.
What can language, behaviour and device data reveal that questionnaires miss?
Natural language processing, digital phenotyping and longitudinal machine learning, used where they add something conventional models cannot, and reported with clear limits on what a prediction can and cannot explain.
Projects
Chronological age is a crude basis for deciding when a young person is ready for social media or online play. This programme harmonises international birth cohorts to identify the developmental, psychological and contextual thresholds that matter more, with supports for families and schools being co-designed with CatholicCare Victoria.
How white-matter development and social-media addiction symptoms unfold together across adolescence, separating trait-like differences from developmental change.
How gaming cultures shape boys' and young men's ideas of masculinity, help-seeking and mental health, studied through online discourse and adolescent gaming trajectories. Funded by the Movember Institute of Men's Health.
Whether the bond between players and their avatars tells us something about wellbeing, physical activity and risk of gaming disorder, followed over several waves.
Associate Investigator with the Trondheim Early Secure Study, led by Lars Wichstrøm, testing how gaming-disorder symptoms are structured and how stable they are across five waves of a birth cohort.
A public, versioned crosswalk of digital-engagement and mental-health items across longitudinal cohorts, so other teams can compare like with like.
Publications
More than 160 peer-reviewed papers across clinical, developmental and digital psychology. These ten trace the arc of the programme, from the first longitudinal studies to current work on digital traces.
People
Most of the work happens with the Digital Minds Cyber Psychology Research Group: researchers, clinicians and doctoral candidates who meet every week to think through problems together. I have led the group since 2016, first as the Gaming Research Group at Federation University and Victoria University. Over that time I have supervised more than twenty PhD candidates, nine of them to completion, and former candidates now hold posts at RMIT, Deakin, the University of Leicester and the University of Tasmania.
Over time the programme has grown through long collaborations in Europe and with health and community partners in Victoria.
Reach
Twenty-four papers are cited in 47 policy documents from 27 bodies in 12 countries, including the OECD, the World Health Organization, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe and UK Parliament committees.SciVal Policy Impact, October 2026
Contact
Institution
School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University, Melbourne
Research group
Identifiers
Prospective PhD candidates are welcome to write with a short note on the question they want to pursue.
38.2° N · 20.5° E
Academic careers are usually told through institutions, positions and papers. There are other coordinates as well. Cephalonia is one of mine.
An island in the Ionian Sea, with a mountain at its centre and water on every side. Work done across many countries still begins somewhere, and seen from there, the rest falls into proportion.