About us

Our mission

SEED Lifespan conducts internationally recognised research to promote healthy physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development from early life and across the lifespan. We partner with individuals, communities, governments, and services to create safe, inclusive environments that foster well-being and resilience.  We aim to:

• understand the major developmental milestones across the lifespan
• understand how our social and emotional development early in life impacts on our mental health, physical health, and wellbeing across the lifespan
• advise on the most effective approaches to intervening at the earliest opportunities in troubled pathways
• engage systems for translating this knowledge broadly.

Who are we?

SEED sprouts from Deakin University’s School of Psychology.

Our researchers and research students specialise in different areas of life course health and development. They are interested in identifying the drivers of poor psychosocial health and development across the lifespan and across generations. They are using this knowledge to inform the development of public health and clinical interventions and health policy to promote optimal physical, emotional, social, and cognitive health and development across the life course.

SEED Lifespan has published over 3,500 publications, including in high impact journals such The Lancet and Nature, which have been collectively cited >150,000 times in Scopus. Since 2014, SEED Lifespan has had striking growth across all funding categories: SEED research grant income exceeds $77M (from all sources), $44.4M Category 1 and $32.9M Category 2-4. We have also attracted significant Category 2-4 funding from large philanthropic organisations such as the Paul Ramsay Foundation, Ian Potter Foundation, Waterloo Foundation, and Federal Departments of Health and Education. SEED findings have been cited in 1423 separate policy documents across Europe, the UK, USA and Australia, including seminal policy documents produced by the World Health Organisation (Switzerland) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, USA).  

These outputs have been recognized through numerous awards, including a Society for Prevention Science Lifetime Achievement Award, an ARC Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award, Victorian Health Promotions Awards, and four Early- and Mid-Career Researchers in SEED receiving Tall Poppy Awards, with two of them honoured as the Tallest Tall Poppy across two consecutive years. Our mentoring with EMCRs has also been recognised by external PhD scholarships from leading research funding organisations such as the NHMRC and Suicide Prevention Australia.

Our Centre Lead

Deakin Distinguished Professor and Scientific Director Craig Olsson has led SEED since it was founded in 2014. He is a developmental psychologist and lifecourse epidemiologist. Professor Olsson works to map the major milestones in social and emotional development from infancy to adulthood and into the next generation. Under his leadership, SEED Lifespan uses this atlas of human development to design targeted  interventions for both clinical, community, and public health settings. Professor Olsson leads two of Australia’s longest-running studies of social and emotional development: The Australian Temperament Project (est. 1983) and the Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Studies (est. 1992). Both studies commenced recruitment of next generation offspring in 2006 and 2012, respectively. Both studies are following original participants and their parents into middle and later adult life. Learn more about Professor Craig Olsson.