Australasian cognitive remediation network brings its 2026 conference to AUT City Campus on 17-18 September

Auckland will host the 2026 ACORN Conference, listed on Eventbrite as the 2026 Cognitive Remediation Conference, across Thursday 17 and Friday 18 September at Auckland University of Technology's City Campus at 55 Wellesley Street East. The Eventbrite listing is live and taking registrations, gives the running time as 8.45am to 5pm, and carries the theme "Translating Cognitive Remediation Therapy; Research to Mental Health Practice". The organiser of record on the listing is Associate Professor Frances Dark.

The New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists carries the same conference on its events page, framing it as the 2026 conference of the Australasian Cognitive Recovery in Mental Health Network and noting that registrations are open for the Friday 18 September main day in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Between the two listings the event is unambiguously confirmed: right city, right venue, right dates.

Who convenes it

The convening body is ACORN, the Australasian COgnitive Recovery in Mental Health Network. On its own site ACORN describes itself as "a collaborative network dedicated to improving cognitive health outcomes for people experiencing mental illness across Australasia", led by a steering committee drawn from clinical, academic and lived-experience communities.

The network's origin is documented by its own founders in an editorial in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, archived in the University of Otago's institutional repository. The authors — Susan Rossell of Swinburne University, Kelly Allott and Shayden Bryce of Orygen and the University of Melbourne, Katie Douglas of the University of Otago in Christchurch, Anne Miles of WISE Employment, Matthew Thomas of Marathon Health, Tamsyn van Rheenen of the University of Melbourne and Frances Dark of Metro South Addiction and Mental Health Service in Brisbane — record that Australasian experts convened the inaugural Australasian Cognitive Remediation in Mental Health Conference in Brisbane in 2024, drawing 70 attendees who set implementation priorities for the region. ACORN was formed in direct response to that meeting, and the editorial states the network would build a resource website, run professional development webinars with national and international experts, and "run an annual conference to facilitate networking and ongoing priority setting".

The Society for Mental Health Research hosts the organising committee listing for that inaugural conference, naming the same group. The 2026 Auckland meeting is therefore the network's annual conference in its established form, and the first edition of the series to be staged in New Zealand rather than Australia. ACORN's own events page also shows past webinars with overseas academics, indicating a network that runs a year-round programme rather than a single annual gathering.

Programme and audience

Cognitive remediation is a structured, evidence-based therapeutic approach targeting cognitive functions such as attention, memory and problem-solving in people living with severe mental illness. The ACORN founders' editorial cites meta-analytic effect sizes of d=0.29 for cognition and d=0.22 for psychosocial functioning in schizophrenia, and notes that the approach is recommended in the Australian and New Zealand clinical practice guidelines for the management of schizophrenia and related disorders. The same editorial argues that despite this evidence base, implementation in routine mental health services across Australasia remains limited, and that no standardised clinician training pathway currently exists in either country. That gap is the conference's reason for being.

The published programme structure is two-part. Thursday 17 September is a pre-conference workshop on Social Cognition Interaction Training, described by the organisers as an important adjunct to cognitive remediation therapy, presented by Associate Professor Frances Dark from Queensland. Friday 18 September is the main conference day, featuring two international experts — Professor Chris Bowie and Professor Alice Medalia — presenting virtually live, alongside in-person presentations from researchers, clinicians and people with lived experience from across New Zealand and Australia. ACORN has also published a two-page final programme on its events page.

The stated audience is clinical and non-clinical mental health staff together with people with lived experience of mental illness. That mix matters for a business events read: it is a professional and clinical education event with a deliberate consumer-participation component, not a purely academic congress, and the delegate profile skews toward psychologists, occupational therapists, nurses and rehabilitation clinicians rather than principal investigators alone.

Venue, movement and accommodation

AUT's City Campus is the university's largest, sitting in the Auckland CBD with its main entrance at Building WA, level 2, 55 Wellesley Street East. AUT states the campus is a 15-minute walk from Britomart train station and the downtown ferry terminal, which puts arriving domestic and trans-Tasman delegates within easy reach on public transport from both the rail and ferry networks. AUT also states there is no on-site parking for students at the City Campus and directs visitors to nearby off-site parking, so organised movement for a two-day clinical audience is realistically a walk-and-public-transport proposition rather than a drive-and-park one. The specific room or building within the campus is not published on either listing.

On accommodation, ACORN has published a delegate booking link to a Radisson property in Auckland with a conference booking code covering the 17-18 September nights. The wider Wellesley Street East and Mayoral Drive area sits inside the main Auckland CBD hotel cluster, so most of the room stock a two-day delegate needs is within walking distance of the lecture theatres.

Why it matters

For Auckland, this is a modest-scale but genuinely international rotation win. A network founded in Brisbane in 2024 has moved its annual meeting across the Tasman inside two cycles, bringing Australian clinicians and researchers into the city for two days in the shoulder season, and doing it on a university campus rather than in a purpose-built convention centre. Campus-hosted association and clinical-network conferences of this size are a reliable and often under-counted part of the New Zealand business events pipeline: they are led by academic and clinical volunteers, they run on Eventbrite and professional-body mailing lists rather than PCO marketing, and they convert directly into CBD room nights and food-and-beverage spend. The presence of a University of Otago academic on the founding committee also gives the network a standing New Zealand anchor, which is usually the precondition for a series returning.