Ben Deery

Dr Ben Deery is an early career researcher, supervisor, and lecturer in Early Childhood Education and Care at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. He is a registered Clinical Neuropsychologist, with many years of experience both clinically and research-based in various paediatric and childhood neurodevelopmental disorders, including working at the Royal Children’s Hospital and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.

He has worked as a Consultant Neuropsychological for Pearson Assessment Australia. He is a qualified Early Childhood Educator, having taught at the internationally regarded University of Melbourne - Early Learning Centre (ELC), Abbotsford. His primary areas of research interest and expertise is in evidence-based learning interventions for children, childhood learning disorders, and the application of mindfulness, play interventions, games, and social-emotional learning in the early years. Ben is currently working on several innovative intervention pilots and proof-of-concepts, including play-based mindfulness for young children, use of games to increase positive adult-child interactions in out-of-school spaces, and new self-report measures of young children's mental health and wellbeing. His mindfulness for young children intervention will be used in a 2019-2021 ARC Discovery Project led by Dr. Jon Quach and MGSE. Ben has also lectured previously in the Masters of Educational Psychology course at the MGSE. During his early childhood studies he was awarded the RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s List for Academic Excellence. His appointments at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute reflect his strong interests in collaboration between the health and education fields to better support children during the early years.