In touch with … Oren Griffiths

We caught up with 2022 Matthew Flinders Fellow Dr Oren Griffiths to learn about his studies into attention and learning, his talent for wearing many different hats simultaneously – and hear what misconception he’d like to dispel.

What is your role and what does your work focus on?

My title is Matthew Flinders Fellow, and I’m a psychology educator, researcher and clinician. I research the interaction of attention and learning, and have recently focused on how attention is deployed while people are performing tasks in virtual reality.  I teach cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology.

What journey brought you to this point in your career?

I was a country kid who got a scholarship to study undergrad psychology at UNSW (Sydney). Originally, I intended to become a clinician but became interested in research during my undergrad years. So when I won another scholarship to study a PhD, I took it up and studied human learning (also at UNSW).

After that, I started working as a full-time researcher in Germany and Sydney, but it wasn’t a good match, so I went back to study a Masters of Clinical Psychology (UNSW) part-time, while at the same time completing my postdoc (on human decision making). I was offered a fellowship with DECRA on human learning, which I took up part-time so I could complete my clinical post-university training (registrar). When I came to Flinders in 2018, I went back into academia full time.

What is something you love most about your work?

In a word, it’s “discovery.” This is the thing that drives most scientists. If you do your job right, then you get to find out something new. You’re the first person ever to know the answer to a question. And then, because we’re publicly funded, we can tell everyone what that answer is, thereby helping them with their work.

What is something you would like people to know about your role?

This is tricky to answer but I think the main misconception is that I only (or mostly) do whatever it is that you currently see me doing. My role is more diverse: I’m an experimental researcher, a lecturer, have various leadership roles (for meetings, committees, budgets and more), I’m a clinical supervisor plus reviewer, advisor, mentor, advisor, referee and panellist.

What is something you are most proud of?

Excluding my son and wife? In an academic context, I’m quite proud of recent work we’ve done in the Defence space. We’ve modelled real-world tasks in immersive VR, and can simultaneously measure eye gaze (where people are looking) and their neural responses (electroencephalography). This combined technique allows us to ask and answer new questions about how human cognitive performance.

What does a normal day look like for you?

Ha! There is No such thing! For example, Friday: I reviewed a journal article for a Cognition journal in the morning, then did some analyses on recent neural data that my honours students have just collected, then reviewed a PhD proposal and was on the panel for her proposal meeting. After that, I spent some time reviewing a student misconduct issue, then arranged an enrolment issue for another student, then organised all the files I needed for my marking for the weekend. I then checked in with our industry-based clinical supervisors regarding supervision for our clinical psychology registrars, then arranged funding for our lab to make a presentation in Perth next month (to DST and UWA), then discussed a paper we’re writing (on errors of attention) with a postdoc who we have working remotely, then ate lunch during the Faculty staff meeting, then reviewed progress on our Defence-funded submarine grant.

John Salamon (postdoc in our lab) had just integrated a new, wireless EEG headset with this virtual reality (VR) display, and this represents an important goal in that project that we’d been working on for a few months. So (after I reviewed an honours thesis) I took the lab to the Tavern to celebrate. And that’s just one Friday.

How do you like to relax or spend your spare time?

On weekends, I can usually be found lounging in local cafes and/or enjoying the amazing dog parks and playgrounds around the south of Adelaide. I’ll probably be reading something about VR, the brain, blockchain or travel.

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