Rate My Professor Penelope Hasking

Professor Penelope Hasking is the John Curtin Distinguished Professor in the Curtin School of Population Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, at Curtin University. She holds a BA (Hons), PhD, and GCHE. Throughout her career at Curtin University, she has advanced from Associate Professor of Psychology to her current distinguished role. Hasking's research focuses on mental health among adolescents and young adults, particularly non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), emotion regulation, personality psychology, and health psychology. She investigates the social and cognitive factors initiating and maintaining NSSI, recovery experiences, ambivalence, stigma, disclosure, scarring impacts, and links to suicidal behavior. Her work emphasizes early intervention to prevent escalation to suicide.

Since 2016, Hasking has led the Australian arm of the World Health Organization’s World Mental Health Surveys – International College Student Initiative, collecting cross-national data on university students' mental health to identify unmet needs and facilitate service connections. As Managing Director and project lead of COMPAS (Checking on Mental Health Providing Alternatives to Suicide), she oversees a suicide prevention program employing an algorithm that assesses risk via social support, coping skills, stressful events, and other factors, outperforming traditional methods by fivefold and yielding a 41.7% decrease in suicidal behavior likelihood within one year of first contact. Hasking served as President of the International Society for the Study of Self-Injury. Her extensive publications include the book Understanding Self-Injury: A Person-Centered Approach, and articles such as The nature and extent of non-suicidal self-injury in a non-clinical sample of young adults (Archives of Suicide Research), Change in emotion regulation strategy use and its impact on adolescent nonsuicidal self-injury (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2014), A cognitive-emotional model of NSSI (2026), and The relationships between sporadic and repetitive non-suicidal self-injury and mental disorders (2025). Awards include Curtin Researcher of the Year (2024), NHMRC Ideas Grant ($579,087), and 2022 Curtinnovation Awards for learning and teaching.