Joanna Barlas

Dr Joanna Barlas is an Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at James Cook University Singapore (JCUS) and a registered clinical psychologist with over 20 years of clinical, teaching, and research experience. She teaches on the professional clinical psychology programme and provides clinical and research supervision to trainee clinical psychologists and PhD candidates across a range of mental health and sociocultural research areas.

Alongside her academic role, Joanna maintains an active clinical practice in Singapore, working with adults presenting with a broad range of psychological difficulties. Prior to joining JCUS in 2013, she worked in the UK National Health Service, specialising in severe and enduring mental health difficulties, personality pathology, trauma, psychosis, and offending behaviour within both secure forensic and community settings.

Joanna’s research focuses on understanding psychological wellbeing, psychological change, and the experiences of underserved and marginalised populations. She has particular expertise in qualitative and mixed-methods research, drawing on approaches such as interpretative phenomenological analysis, reflexive thematic analysis, and framework analysis, to explore lived experience, recovery, caregiving, trauma, identity, and mental health service provision. Her work aims to amplify underrepresented voices and inform clinical practice, service development, and policy.

A second strand of her research examines psychological processes that contribute to adaptive and maladaptive functioning across the lifespan. Drawing on her clinical expertise in schema therapy and process-based approaches to mental health, she investigates how early experiences, cognitive and emotional processes, and interpersonal patterns influence wellbeing, resilience, and psychological distress. More recently, her work is exploring innovative approaches to psychotherapy process and outcome research, including the integration of qualitative methods, ecological momentary assessment and physiological measures to understand mechanisms of psychological change.