Gerard J. Byrne, BSc (Med), MBBS, PhD, FRANZCP 
(Australia), Board of Directors

Dr Gerard Byrne completed his medical degree in Sydney at the University of New South Wales and at the Prince of Wales and Prince Henry Hospitals. He completed his PhD in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. After some initial training in internal medicine, he obtained his Fellowship with the Royal Australian & New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 1988. Since then he has worked as an old age psychiatrist at the Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital (RBWH).

Dr Byrne directs the RBWH Older Persons’ Mental Health Service and is the Head of the Academic Discipline of Psychiatry within the School of Medicine at the University of Queensland, both in Brisbane. His clinical work spans inpatient, outpatient and community outreach settings. He also consults at the RBWH Memory Clinic.

Dr Byrne supervises PhD students working on topics relevant to the mental health of older people. He has been awarded research grant support in excess of $6 million, including a recent grant from the U.S. Alzheimer’s Association. Dr Byrne publishes his research findings regularly in journals relevant to geriatric psychiatry, including in International Psychogeriatrics. He has published more than 100 journal articles and book chapters.

Dr Byrne’s research interests have focussed on clinical aspects of mental disorders in older people. Most recently, he has collaborated with Dr Nancy Pachana on the development of the Geriatric Anxiety Inventory (GAI), a new scale to measure anxiety in older people. He recently published a short form of the GAI, called the GAI-SF, and is currently developing an informant version of this scale for use in people with dementia who are unable to complete the GAI. The GAI is now available in more than a dozen languages and is regularly used around the world.

Dr Byrne is strongly involved in teaching medical students and psychiatry trainees. He is the director of the advanced training program in psychiatry of old age in his home state and will soon take on this role at the national level. With others, he is currently developing competency-based assessment methods for use by Australian and New Zealand old age psychiatry training programs. With Dr Nancy Pachana, he coordinates a popular course in Applied Gerontology for doctoral students in clinical psychology at the University of Queensland.

Arising out of his clinical work, and in collaboration with Dr Christine Neville, Dr Byrne recently published a textbook for health workers joining older persons’ community teams, called Community Mental Health for Older People (Byrne & Neville, Elsevier, 2009). He is currently working on an edited volume on Anxiety Disorders in Older People, to be published by Cambridge University Press.

He can be contacted at gerard@psychiatry.uq.edu.au.

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