ProfessorBarbara Barbosa Neves

Professor Barbara Barbosa Neves (PhD, FRSA, FHEA) is an award-winning sociologist of technology, ageing, and health based at the Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies. She holds a prestigious Sydney Horizon Fellowship in AI social science and is an incoming ARC Future Fellow (2026-2030). Dr Neves is an internationally recognised expert on loneliness, social isolation, and digital inequalities in later life.

Barbara has secured more than $7 million dollars in competitive external funding from scientific and industry bodies in Australia, the European Union, and Canada. She currently holds an ARC Discovery Project on loneliness and technology and two MRFFs on dementia. Additionally, she is the Lead Chief Investigator of a national evaluation of the ACVVS for the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care. Her co-designed, mixed-methods research focuses on how technologies like AI, VR, and robotics can benefit rather than exclude older people (65+).

This research has received 28 esteemed awards in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia -- and it has been used to refine technology design and inform social policy and care practices (Canada, Australia, Europe). Dr Neves has a background in sociology and human-computer interaction. Prior to moving to Australia, she was an Associate Director at the Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada.

Barbara has taught over 10 courses and 4,000 students throughout her academic career. She was named a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) in 2023. In 2022, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (UK) and named among the ABC Top 5 Humanities and Social Science Scholars in Australia in 2019. Barbara has held several visiting positions (University of Oxford, University of Oslo, University of Louvain, University of Toronto) and delivered over 50 invited keynotes and 70 talks across five continents.

Her research has been published in top-tier journals across social and computer sciences. Five of her articles have won scientific and industry awards in sociology, gerontology, and computer science. She serves in the editorial board of 'Sociology', the flagship journal of the British Sociological Association.

Barbara is passionate about public communication. She is a regular media commentator with over 200 media contributions. Her work has appeared in the ABC, CBC, SBS, The Guardian, among others. She has written several op-eds for the ABC and The Conversation and appeared in the SBS documentary "What does Australia really think about old people?"

Further information can be found on her website.