Daniel Stjepanović is a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research at The University of Queensland.

Dr Stjepanović is an experimental cognitive neuroscientist by training. Following his PhD training, Dr Stjepanović completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University in North Carolina, USA. During this time Dr Stjepanović collaborated extensively with the Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Centre to generate new knowledge about the causes of mental disorders by translating basic animal and human research to understanding the neural bases of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Upon completion of this fellowship Dr Stjepanović returned to Australia and began working with NCYSUR, with a focus on cannabis policy, meta-science of addiction research and expanding basic experimental work to investigate the influence of substance use on higher cognitive functions such as social cognition.

Dr Stjepanović’s work has been published in journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Lancet, and Nature Disease Primers.

Researcher biography

Dr Stjepanović is a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research (NCYSUR). His work focusses on how drug use patterns are changing, particularly as a consequence of public policy. This includes, for example, understanding who vapes cannabis, if psychedelics are being used to self-treat physical and psychiatric symptoms, and what the effect psychedelic microdosing has. Additionally, he is interested in using experimental methods to understand substance use, leveraging his background in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.