Thomas Pace

• Researcher and Lecturer at the Thompson Institute, University of the Sunshine Coast

Dr Thomas Pace is a Lecturer in the Mental Health and Neuroscience Postgraduate Programs and a researcher in the Healthy Brain Ageing Research Program at the Thompson Institute. He is a cognitive neuroscientist specialising in multimodal neuroimaging, metacognition, mental imagery, and dementia risk reduction.

Thomas's research investigates how the brain creates visual representations of the world, how it monitors its own cognitive processes (metacognition), and how lifestyle interventions can improve brain health and reduce dementia risk. His recent work in Cerebral Cortex revealed neural oscillatory markers of domain-specific metacognitive processing and age-related compensation, using combined psychophysics and EEG. Building on this, he established UniSC's simultaneous EEG-fMRI (sEEG-fMRI) neuroimaging platform, and is leading the META study, a university first sEEG-fMRI investigation, which will map the spatiotemporal dynamics of metacognition.

Thomas coordinates postgraduate courses within the Mental Health and Neuroscience program, including Neuroimaging Advances in Mental Health.

Prior to his lectureship, Thomas was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Thompson Institute. Before joining UniSC, Thomas worked as a Research Assistant at Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), where he contributed to research on habits and cognitive flexibility in ageing and delivered a physical activity intervention for older adults with subjective cognitive decline.

Thomas completed his PhD in Psychology at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where his doctoral research combined psychophysics and EEG to investigate the neural basis of mental imagery and attention.

• 2024–present Lecturer, Thompson Institute - University of the Sunshine Coast
• 2023–2024 Postdoctoral research fellow, Thompson Institute - University of the Sunshine Coast

• 2024 UNSW, PhD Psychology

• 2025 Neural oscillations of metacognition: evidence for domain-specificity and age-related compensation, Cerebral Cortex
• 2024 Modifiable dementia risk associated with smaller white matter volume and altered 1/f aperiodic brain activity: cross-sectional insights from the LEISURE study, Age & Ageing
• 2023 Different mechanisms for supporting mental imagery and perceptual representations: modulation versus excitation, Psychological Science

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