Liza van Eijk

Dr Liza van Eijk is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at James Cook University with recognised expertise in neuroimaging and neuropsychology, and a strong clinical–research focus. She is the founder and head of the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory at JCU, a translational research initiative that brings together clinicians, health services, and researchers across Townsville University Hospital, Cairns Hospital, the CSIRO, the University of Queensland, and JCU. Through this laboratory, Dr van Eijk has established clinical–academic partnerships that support high‑quality neuroscience research addressing health priorities in regional Australia. In line with impactful research, she has recently established a Consumer Working Group under the Margaret Roderick Centre for Mental Health, embedding consumer perspectives to strengthen research relevance and translation.

Across populations and settings, her research seeks to develop and validate scalable, clinically meaningful imaging markers to support earlier diagnosis, improved prognostic accuracy and risk stratification, enabling more timely and targeted intervention. This work bridges advanced neuroimaging with real‑world clinical application.

For example, Dr van Eijk leads a competitive TAAHC‑funded research project as Principal Investigator, examining the feasibility, implementation, and clinical utility of neonatal MRI without sedation for infants at high risk of adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes in regional North Queensland. This multi‑site study is being conducted at Townsville University Hospital and Cairns Hospital, with participant recruitment nearing completion, with support from the University of Queensland and the CSIRO. The project builds capacity for a feed-and-wrap neonatal MRI scan (without sedation) and findings of this research have direct implications for early clinical decision‑making and intervention pathways. This work builds on her Postdoctoral Research Fellow role at the CSIRO (2019–2020) focused on automated neonatal MRI measures.

Dr van Eijk is also involved in other biomarker projects, such as identifying early markers of stress measured with EEG, detecting treatment differences in Multiple Sclerosis using quantitative MRI, and validating a measure of early detection of stroke by measuring the penumbra with MRI.

Dr van Eijk is deeply committed to excellence in teaching and research training, and is passionate about sharing neuroscience with students at all levels. She teaches undergraduate neuroscience subjects PY2101 and PY3109, delivering research‑led and clinically informed teaching that integrates neuroimaging and neuroscience theory with practice. She supervises multiple Honours students and HDR candidates, and actively embeds students within her research program through the Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory. She has also coordinated Neurostem, a collaborative effort between Psychology, Medicine, and Engineering at JCU providing an educative program for high-school students in Townsville to gain confidence in STEM skills through hands-on activities focused on a real-world problem: stress.  Through these activities, Dr van Eijk plays a substantive role in advancing student learning and researcher development, while strengthening neuroscience research and building capacity at JCU and regional communities, such as health and education collaborators.

Dr van Eijk completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Queensland (2015–2019), which included an industry placement at CSIRO focused on neonatal image processing. Her doctoral research examined sex differences in brain structure and function and their relationships with behaviour and neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, using large‑scale structural and functional MRI datasets (N > 1000). Her work has been published in leading international journals, including NeuroImage and Psychological Science, and she regularly presents at national and international conferences. During her PhD, she worked as a Research Assistant at the Queensland Brain Institute. Prior she completed a Research Masters in Cognitive Neuropsychology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, including a combined clinical neuropsychology internship at GGZ Delfland and a research internship at the University of Cambridge.