Rate My Professor Olivia Harrison

Associate Professor Olivia Harrison is a neuroscientist based in the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago. She completed a double degree in neuroscience and exercise science at the University of Otago in 2011 and earned her DPhil in clinical neurosciences from the University of Oxford, where she explored the brain's perception of breathlessness using brain imaging. Following her doctorate, she worked with High Performance Sport New Zealand and continued research at Oxford on body perception during exercise to enhance athletic performance. In 2018, she received a European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETH Zurich to investigate the interoceptive connections between anxiety and breathing perception. Returning to the University of Otago as a Rutherford Discovery Research Fellow, she was promoted to Associate Professor effective February 2026. She co-leads the IMAGE Otago Research Group with Associate Professor Bruce Russell.

Harrison's research centers on the relationship between mental health and interoception, the sense of internal bodily states, with a particular emphasis on breathing perception in anxiety and depression. Utilizing advanced neuroimaging techniques and computational models, she examines how the brain detects and learns from bodily signals and how interventions like exercise, anxiolytics, and SSRIs modulate these processes. Her findings have shown that individuals with higher anxiety exhibit reduced sensitivity to respiratory changes and altered brain activity in predicting bodily symptoms. Notable publications include "Interoception of breathing and its relationship with anxiety" (Neuron, 2021), "The relationship between interoception of breathing, anxiety, and resting-state functional connectivity in the brain" by Chemis et al. (Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2025), "Distinguishing the activity of adjacent somatosensory nuclei within the brainstem using 3T fMRI" by Howell et al. (Imaging Neuroscience, 2025), and "The effect of an acute bout of self-selected intensity exercise on state anxiety and anxiety sensitivity" by Connor et al. (Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2026). Harrison has been honored with the five-year Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, the 2021 L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship, the Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize in 2025, and delivered the public lecture "Breathing and anxiety: Understanding the miscommunication between brain and body" in 2025.