Gery Karantzas, PhD
Science and Research Director
A relationship scientist whose career has been spent making attachment research useful to the clinicians who need it most.
Gery Karantzas is a Professor of Psychology at Deakin University in Australia and the Director of the Science of Adult Relationships Laboratory, known to most people who follow the field as the SoAR Lab. He is a couples therapist by clinical training and, by reputation, one of Australia’s leading voices in the science of adult attachment and close relationships. The reputation has not arrived through luck or branding. It is the result of two decades spent asking unfashionably difficult questions about how people manage to love each other, fail each other, and try again.
The work has always lived at the intersection of research that holds up and clinical practice that works in the room.
Gery’s research traces how couples and families negotiate the transitions that tend to expose every weak seam: becoming parents, separating, supporting one another through illness, surviving violence inside a relationship, holding on through grief. Adult attachment runs through the work as a guiding thread, alongside coping, social support, and the question of how close relationships shape mental health across a lifespan. Some of the most useful pieces of this work are the ones translating attachment theory into schema therapy, where the bridge between research and clinical intervention has historically been thinner than it should be.
Funding bodies have been paying attention for a long time.
The lab has attracted more than five million dollars in competitive research funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and beyondblue. Recognition has come in the form of awards as well, including the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence at Deakin, the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for International Research Collaboration, the Australian Psychological Society Early Career Teaching Award, citations from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, and a national Excellence Award from the Office of Learning and Teaching. The full list runs longer than is comfortable to read out loud, which is part of why he tends not to.
The science only matters if it reaches the people who can use it.
That conviction has shaped a public-facing career that runs alongside the academic one. Gery founded Relationship Science Online, a platform built to translate research into tools that clinicians and the general public can actually pick up and use. Articles written for The Conversation and Psychology Today have drawn more than three million reads, and the media calls regularly when something complicated about love or attachment needs explaining without losing accuracy. For more than a decade, workshops, seminars, and lectures have brought the same material to health professionals, students, and community audiences, both in Australia and internationally.
Within professional organizations, leadership has tended to find him.
Gery served as the former national convenor of the Australian Psychological Society’s Psychology of Relationships Interest Group, a role that asks for steady stewardship rather than spotlight. At Deakin, he teaches across undergraduate and honours programs and supervises Masters and PhD students in social, developmental, and clinical-health psychology. Doctoral training came from La Trobe University, with an undergraduate science degree from the University of Melbourne underneath it.