2024 WINNER OF TE PUIAKI KAIPŪTAIAO MAEA THE MACDIARMID EMERGING SCIENTIST PRIZE
Dr Olivia Harrison has been announced as the winner of the Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize for 2024, awarded in 2025.
Dr Olivia Harrison, a Rutherford Discovery Fellow, heads a multidisciplinary team based at the School of Psychology at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago. She is being recognised for her research on understanding and managing anxiety.
Read media release about Olivia’s prize
Anxiety is a debilitating mental health condition which is increasingly common, and disproportionately high in New Zealand, particularly among Māori communities. Dr Harrison’s research focuses on the role of interoception in anxiety. Interoception is awareness of internal sensations, such as heart rate, hunger, temperature, pain, and emotions. Dysregulation of interoception can contribute to anxiety disorders, if the brain misinterprets signals from the body, or vice versa. Dr Harrison’s team uses neuroscience, psychiatry, physiology, psychology, and computational modelling to study how the brain and body interpret and misinterpret signals.
Dr Harrison began this research in Switzerland, but earned a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2019 that brought her back to New Zealand. Since then, she has maintained her international links and also established a productive research network in this country. Dr Harrison’s team is investigating the efficacy of the main treatments available in New Zealand in two large-scale longitudinal studies that are also testing non-pharmaceutical approaches such as exercise. One of the aims is to test whether strategies like breathwork might help some patients, to enable personalised strategies for management of anxiety.
Through this work, Dr Harrison has connected with a diverse range of people who live with anxiety, including Māori communities. She also presents regularly to practising Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and General Practitioners about how to help patients to manage their symptoms of anxiety. She is also committed to wider dissemination of evidence-based information on anxiety through the media and to the general public.
