October 23, 2026
The Royal Society of NSW was delighted to learn that two of its Fellows, Professor Lisa Adkins FRSN FASSA, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney, and Professor Jill Newby, FRSN FASSA, Professor of Clinical Psychology at UNSW Sydney and based at the Black Dog Institute, were recently elected as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Professor Lisa Adkins is a distinguished sociologist whose influential research examines post-industrial societies, work, finance, wealth and inequality. Her research is central to the asset economy thesis, which argues that assets are replacing commodities as the dominant economic form. Her empirical work shows how income from assets—especially housing—can outpace wages, making homeownership more precarious and reshaping class and inequality. Earlier research explored service labour, unemployment, austerity, reproductive labour, capital and gender. Across her career, Adkins has combined conceptual and empirical innovation, reframing major debates on housing affordability, social class, employment and gender while providing important frameworks for understanding contemporary societal change.
Professor Newby is an expert in Clinical Psychology, specialising in digital mental health interventions for adults and young people with depression and anxiety. Her work focuses on developing accessible, affordable, effective and scalable psychological and lifestyle-based treatment programs for these common mental health conditions, testing their efficacy in clinical trials, and making them available to the community. She is particularly interested in how digital mental health and artificial intelligence tools can be used to deliver better, more personalised care for mental health. Most of my research is focused on depression and anxiety, but my work also focuses on the overlap between these conditions and chronic physical illness, anxiety about illness (called health anxiety), and how misinformation and online health information (like searching Dr Google) affect how people interact with the healthcare system.
The Council of the Society extends its warm congratulations to both Professor Adkins and Professor Newby on this latest recognition of their outstanding research.
