Dr. Conal Monaghan directs the Precision Lab at the Australian National University, where he is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine and Psychology. His research advances psychological measurement across clinical psychology, psychometric theory, and artificial intelligence.
He works across three connected lines of research: dimensional models of personality and psychopathology, advancing evidence-based frameworks such as the DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD), the ICD-11, and the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) to improve diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment; AI-integrated psychological research, applying large language models and AI pipelines to accelerate measurement development, literature synthesis, and the study of real-world behaviour from unstructured data; and idiographic psychometrics, developing open-source instruments for person-specific measurement and the study of within-person structure and variation. All of his instruments are, and always will be, open-source and freely available.
A registered Clinical Psychologist and Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society’s Clinical College, Conal is a board-approved supervisor and a member of the HiTOP consortium’s Clinical Translation and Quantitative Methods workgroups. He completed his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the ANU in 2019.
His work has been cited over 1,100 times (h-index 16) across 45 publications, and he has supervised 40 research students. His most-cited contributions include the development and validation of the Two-Dimensional Model of Machiavellianism and work on dimensional models of personality disorders.
Clinical practice
The lab's science is grounded in real clinical practice. Conal is a registered Clinical Psychologist with experience across youth, adult, inpatient, and neuropsychological assessment settings. Those are the same problems that motivate the lab's measurement research.
Credentials
- Registered Clinical Psychologist (PSY0001819219)
- Fellow, Australian Psychological Society Clinical College
- Board-approved supervisor for clinical and registered psychologists
- Frameworks: CBT and Schema Therapy
Practice experience
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Senior Psychologist
2018–2019Hyson Green, Calvary Hospital
Led outpatient anxiety and depression group programs; developed and ran inpatient groups and delivered one-to-one inpatient psychological interventions.
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Clinical Psychologist (Private Practitioner)
2016–2019headspace Canberra
CBT, ACT, and Schema-based therapy for youth and adolescents (12–25). Contributed to Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) development.
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Provisional Psychologist
2015Southern Area Brain Injury Service (SABIS), Goulburn
Administered, scored, and interpreted intellectual, functional, personality, and neuropsychological tests; wrote assessment reports for government agencies and integrated treatment with the broader healthcare team.
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Provisional Psychologist
2015ANU Counselling Centre
Acute and ongoing one-to-one support for students with anxiety, uni/bipolar depression, trauma, and relationship difficulties, including risk monitoring and crisis-team liaison.
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Provisional Psychologist
2014ANU Psychology Clinic
Mixed child and adult placement: intakes and short-term CBT for internalising and externalising presentations, cognitive assessments and reports, and group programs for school-aged students.
Teaching
Conal convenes the lab's assessment and research-methods teaching at ANU; see Teaching & Training for current courses and workshops. Two course redesigns below reflect how he approaches it: put the hard parts in students' hands early, and make the work resemble the job.
Course design
Research methods and statistics
PSYC8411 / PSYC4811
A flipped-classroom redesign of the joint Honours and MPP statistics stream. Recorded modules let students work through content at their own pace, freeing class time for hands-on workshops applying each method to real datasets in JASP (with SPSS guides also provided). The twelve core modules were chosen from a survey of psychology supervisors on the methods they most needed students to know. Statistics anxiety is addressed directly rather than ignored: discussed openly in the first week, with assigned peer study groups so students build a support network early.
Authentic clinical assessment
PSYC8510
Advanced Assessment is built around three problem learning sets, each a real de-identified case representing one of the primary presentations seen in psychological assessment: structured diagnostic assessment, psychopathology test battery, and cognitive assessment. Students learn a new instrument for each through guided practice and frequent feedback, then administer it to an external volunteer, deliver a feedback session, and write a professional assessment report, with a volunteer medical doctor acting as the referring agent. The emphasis is on learning how to learn an unfamiliar test, not just how to score one.
Previously taught
- 2021–2023
Honours Statistics Stream
Co-convener
- 2020–2023
Research Methods & Statistics in Professional Practice
Convener
- 2020–2023
Psychologist Individual Supervision (4+2 / 5+1)
Supervisor
- 2019, 2023
Psychopathology Across the Lifespan; Personality
Guest lecturer