One in three Australians will be affected by a neurological or mental health condition in their lifetime. Brain disorders are now the leading cause of ill health and disability globally. The people gathering at BrainTech 2026 are, in their different ways, trying to change that.
The foundation hiding in plain sight
Cochlear and others that followed have created deep pools of clinical, regulatory, engineering and commercial expertise that have since flowed into the next generation of Australian braintech. One of those who carry this experience forward is Mary Beth Brinson who will be sharing her expertise at BrainTech 2026. She spent 16 years at Cochlear, rising to VP of Global Clinical Affairs and is now the CEO of Wavewise Analytics which translates continuous brain-monitoring R&D into clinical products for intensive care settings.
Philanthropy plays the same long game. The Clem Jones Foundation made an initial $2 million gift to the Queensland Brain Institute fifteen years ago, funding Professor Jürgen Götz and a decade of research that became the scanning ultrasound technology now licensed to Ceretas, currently in clinical trials to help people with Alzheimer’s. That same research ecosystem has since spawned EMVision Medical Devices, developing portable electromagnetic brain scanners for stroke detection. As Peter Johnstone, CEO of the Clem Jones Foundation, has said: that initial investment “has been leveraged to attract other support from the Queensland and federal governments as well as other philanthropic backing.” Peter Johnstone will be sharing on the vital role of philanthropy at BrainTech 2026.
Professor David Grayden has worked across many neural technologies – the cochlear implant, the bionic eye, epileptic seizure prediction, brain-machine interfaces and vagus nerve stimulation. He co-founded the BioDesign Innovation program at the University of Melbourne, training engineering and business students how to innovate medical technologies. He is precious connective tissue, the kind of person who joins the dots connecting students to opportunity. He will be speaking at BrainTech 2026.
And behind every headline about a revolutionary device, there is someone who actually did the surgery. Andrew Morokoff is the neurosurgeon for the first-in-human clinical trials of NeuroVista, Synchron, Epiminder and Coherence Neuro — four of the most significant braintech trials in Australian history. He will also be at BrainTech 2026.
Brain health at scale
The expertise is right here, under our noses. Braintech is responsible for so much of our brain health — detecting disease earlier, protecting against decline, treating conditions that were once untreatable, helping people maintain their cognitive health across a lifetime. Technology is the intervention that helps us reach so many. But world-class science sitting in a lab needs backers willing to fund the journey, champions who refuse to let great work stay invisible, and collaboration that turns a brilliant idea into something millions of people can actually access.
A live free, no-referral national digital mental health service has just gone live after St Vincent’s Health Australia was awarded a $217 million federal contract to deliver Medicare Mental Health Check In. Built on the THIS WAY UP platform that St Vincent’s has been quietly developing for over two decades, it will reach hundreds of thousands of Australians who currently can’t access help because of cost, geography or wait times.
Orygen — Australia’s centre of excellence in youth mental health, and the largest concentration of youth mental health researchers in the world — secured $14 million from Wellcome in late 2025 to build an hyper-personalised, AI-adaptive platform for youth mental health care, scaling globally with UNICEF and the Telstra Foundation.
And the Australian Epilepsy Project — led by Professor Graeme Jackson at the Florey Institute was awarded a second $30 million from the Medical Research Future Fund in May 2026. The first $30 million built a world-first AI platform combining MRI imaging, genetic analysis and cognitive assessment, now connected to more than 2,100 patients and 160 neurologists across Australia. The new funding scales it nationally and extends it to other neurological and mental health conditions.
These things are all happening and we will be talking about all of them and what we can learn from them at BrainTech 2026.
More than the sum of its parts
Australia ranks in the global top ten for neuroscience research output and we are hopefully getting better at commercialisation. We have genuine comparative advantage built through our world-class science, trial environment and surgical expertise. The manufacturing capability is beginning to emerge, with Neo-Bionica filling a gap. Public investment seems to be arriving — the National Reconstruction Fund, Breakthrough Victoria, Brandon Capital’s dementia incubator, the MRFF.
The question is whether all of this becomes more than the sum of its parts. As Professor Henry Brodaty — one of Australia’s foremost dementia researchers — told the National Press Club in 2025: “It’s time for a national movement for brain health, backed by research, scaled with urgency and funded to save lives and money.” We think it can. Which is why we are gathering at BrainTech 2026. We hope you can join us.