DrLeonard Hoon

I aim for real-world impact in health, particularly digital mental health and dementia care; the research and engineering are how I get there. As Deputy Head, Translational Research and Commercialisation at Deakin's Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative (A2I2), I lead the institute's translational portfolio across the full Technology Readiness Level spectrum, from research design through to commercialisation. I co-lead these programs as the technical and AI lead alongside clinical experts who hold the health domain; this has built durable partnerships with the Black Dog Institute, the MARCS Institute, and Deakin's Institute for Health Transformation.

My research draws on long-standing foundations in software engineering, human-computer interaction, and natural language processing, built in industry before I came to academia. I have secured more than $10 million in named research funding across Wellcome, NHMRC, MRFF, and ARC programs. Conductor is where those threads converge; it is a modular digital trial orchestration platform whose design I led and continue to lead. It runs across four institutions and has supported more than 3,000 participants across seven studies. Conductor underpinned Vibe Up, the world's first AI-enhanced adaptive clinical trial; I implemented the contextual multi-armed bandit driving its real-time adaptation, and the study was published in JAMA Network Open in 2025. I co-founded Memory Aid Pty Ltd, a dementia-care spinout that reached the finals of the UK's NESTA Longitude Prize on Dementia and holds an international patent application. I am increasingly turning to the theoretical foundations of this work, with an emerging interest in the limits of AI governance through second-order cybernetics.

My contributions have been recognised through Deakin Vice-Chancellor's Awards for Research Partner Engagement (2025) and Teaching Excellence (2021), an Industry Engagement Award for Leadership in Industry-Engaged Learning, and a Best Poster Award at IEEE e-Science (2022). I have contributed to national AI policy through the Australian AI Ethics Framework, Standards Australia's AI Standards Consultation, and the Australian Cyber-Security Strategy response; I am an invited international speaker, most recently at NYU Shanghai's roundtable on technology and youth mental health.

linkedin.com/in/leonardhoon