Associate Professor Walterfang has a significant track record in neuroimaging and volumetric research in major mental illness. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Melbourne in neuroimaging in psychiatric illness, including depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and personality disorders. With Dr Dennis Velakoulis, he developed, validated and published the cognitive screening tool, the NUCOG, and has involved in conceptualising and delivering a number of other carer- and clinician-rated cognitive tools for psychiatric practice. He has also been involved in research into rare neurometabolic disorders which present with psychiatric illness, in particular, Niemann-Pick type C disease (a rare cholesterol storage disorder affecting 1 in 150,000 Australians) and chorea-acanthocytosis (a rare membrane protein disorder that causes abnormal movements much like Huntington’s disease).
He has published over eighty Medline-indexed scientific publications in major psychiatric, neurological and neuroimaging journals. He is also one of a handful of Australian authors to be invited to contribute a chapter to the world’s most popular and respected psychiatric reference text, Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Psychiatry.