Dr Cassy Dittman
Secretary & Australia Regional Representative
(Central Queensland University, Queensland)
Dr Dittman is the current Secretary of AHDA and has been involved with the association as a member since 2012. Her first academic presentation was at the 2007 AHDA conference in Sydney and she remembers fondly the warm, encouraging and stimulating scientific environment the association created for students and early career researchers. Dr Dittman continues to be involved in AHDA to help continue this legacy of supporting the next generation of researchers in human development and more generally promote developmental science in the Australasian region.
Dr Dittman is Head of Course (Undergraduate Psychology) and Lecturer in the School of Health, Medical and Applied Sciences at Central Queensland University and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Parenting and Family Support Centre at The University of Queensland. She is a developmental psychologist interested in the impact of parenting and parent-child relationships on child and adolescent development and wellbeing. She has particular expertise in the field of evidence-based parenting programs and their capacity to promote important developmental skills and outcomes in children and adolescents, including positive development, and behavioural and emotional adjustment. Her recent research includes positive parenting in junior sport, the influence of parent-adolescent relationships in the positive development and mental health of adolescents and emerging adults, and the development of adolescent-specific measures of adolescent functioning, parenting, and the parent-adolescent relationship.