Rate My Professor James Kesby

Dr. James Kesby is a Lecturer in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland, where he also holds affiliations as an Advanced Researcher in the Developmental Neurobiology Research Stream at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and an Affiliate Research Fellow and Honorary Senior Fellow at the Queensland Brain Institute. He completed his Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Science (Honours), and Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, with his PhD awarded in 2010 on the effects of developmental vitamin D depletion on the dopaminergic system and behaviour in rats under supervisors Professor Darryl Eyles and Associate Professor Thomas Burne. Kesby's career includes postdoctoral research, contributing to his expertise in neuroscience.

Kesby's research focuses on cognitive and decision-making dysfunctions in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, which impose significant burdens and predict poor functional outcomes like challenges in employment and social integration. He investigates the links between decision-making impairments and psychotic symptoms, using tasks targeting psychosis-implicated brain networks, particularly corticostriatal circuitry. Through cross-species collaborations with basic and clinical researchers, he employs rodent models to uncover causative neural substrates and potential interventions. His interests extend to early dopamine development in schizophrenia risk and methamphetamine dependence effects on neurochemistry and cognition. Kesby has secured major funding, including the Advance Queensland Research Fellowship (2016-2019), Maltz Prize for Innovative and Promising Schizophrenia Research from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2020-2023), NHMRC Project Grant on dopamine neuron ontogeny (2018-2022), UQ Early Career Researcher Grant (2017), and RL Cooper Medical Research Foundation grant (2017). Key publications include "Dopamine, psychosis and schizophrenia: the widening gap between basic and clinical neuroscience" (Translational Psychiatry, 2018), "Neural circuitry of salience and reward processing in psychosis" (Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, 2021), "The effects of vitamin D on brain development and adult brain function" (Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, 2011), and "Developmental vitamin D deficiency causes abnormal brain development" (Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2009). With 69 works listed in UQ eSpace, he has supervised PhD theses on schizophrenia-related cognition and serves as a media expert on addiction, brain science, mental illness, neuroscience, psychosis, and schizophrenia.