Simon Dennis

Professor Simon Dennis is Professor of Psychology in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, at the University of Melbourne. He earned his PhD from The University of Queensland. He serves as Director of the Complex Human Data Hub (CHDH), where the primary aim is to develop Computational Behavioural Science by bringing computational methods to bear on big data to better understand psychological processes. He is also Head of the Memory and Language Lab in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. His research utilizes large-scale real-world data, experimental paradigms, and computational modelling techniques to investigate the cognitive architecture underlying memory and language. Much of his work employs experience sampling technologies, including smartphone apps, social media, and Internet-of-Things devices, to capture people's experiences and behaviors in real-world settings, yielding large longitudinal datasets with high ecological validity. The lab employs probabilistic models, machine learning techniques, signal processing approaches, and dynamic systems methods to simulate human performance and explore how memory and language phenomena manifest from the same neural structures.

Simon Dennis is CEO of Unforgettable Research Services Pty Ltd, which provides an extensive ecosystem for data collection, retrieval, visualization, and analysis. He has interests in privacy and the concept of participant-owned data. Key publications include "The Antecedents of Transformer Models" (Dennis, Shabahang, & Yim, 2025, Current Directions in Psychological Science), "Does TikTok contribute to eating disorders? A comparison of the TikTok algorithms belonging to individuals with eating disorders versus healthy controls" (Griffiths et al., 2024, Body Image), "Latent Relations at Steady-state with Associative Nets" (Shabahang, Yim, & Dennis, 2024, Cognitive Science), "A systematic reexamination of the list-length effect in recognition memory" (Yim, Dennis, & Osth, 2025, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General), and "Sources of Interference in Memory Across Development" (2022). He contributes to public discourse via Pursuit by the University of Melbourne, addressing big data in psychology, privacy and health, research data ownership, and sensors revealing how minds work.

Professional Email: simon.dennis@unimelb.edu.au