Con Stough

Con Stough is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, director of the Swinburne Centre for Neuropsychology and director of the newly formed National Institute of Complementary Medicine (NICM) Collaborative Centre for the study of herbal and natural medicines for neurocognition.

Stough's main interest lies in the area of intelligence, primarily the assessment of intelligence, theories of intelligence, the biological basis of intelligence and how to improve intelligence. He is a member of the editorial board of the Intelligence journal.

Early life
Stough was educated at Prince Alfred College and completed his PhD in the Department of Psychology at the University of Adelaide in 1994 under the supervision of Ted Nettelbeck. He gained several publications during his PhD, developing basic work on the relationship of inspection time to human intelligence, in particular to the information processing speed model of ability.

Academic career
This was followed by a post-doctoral position at the University of Auckland working on the pharmacological and cognitive effects of the cholinergic agonist nicotine. At this time he also worked with Timothy Bates on evoked potential, reaction time, and inspection time measures of ability.

Following a second post-doctoral position at the University of Queensland with Professors Gina Geffen and Nick Martin, working on the heritability of inspection time, he moved to Swinburne University of Technology where he has built up one of Australia's larger groups of individual differences researchers.

Over the last decade he has worked on the neurochemical basis of intelligence, (including the distinct roles of dopamine, serotonin and acetylcholine), on cognition and emotion. He has also conducted extensive work on: the mechanisms of herbal treatments that improve intelligence, (such as Ginkgo Biloba and the Indian herb Bacopa monnieri); the assessment of emotional intelligence and evoked potentials; and the neuropsychological effects of electromagnetic emissions. In the clinical field, he has worked on the assessment of disorders including depression, OCD, PTSD, sexual offending and Dissociative Identity Disorder.

He is a regular keynote presenter, has published over 100 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, and attracted several million dollars in government and industry grants. With Ben Palmer, he is the co-developer of the SUEIT (Swinburne University Emotional Intelligence Test, also referred to as GENOS EI) and helped develop the company GENOS which now commercially uses this framework in organisations across Australia to develop emotional intelligence and leadership.