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 the science of psychological measurement at the intersection of 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 — the same problems that motivate the lab's measurement research.
Credentials
- Registered Clinical Psychologist (PSY0001819219)
- Fellow, Australian Psychological Society Clinical College
- Board-approved supervisor — clinical and registered psychologists
- Frameworks: CBT and Schema Therapy
Practice experience
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Provisional Psychologist
2015ANU Counselling Centre
Acute and ongoing one-to-one support for students — anxiety, uni/bipolar depression, trauma, and relationship difficulties — including risk monitoring and crisis-team liaison.
-
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.