Mind-body connection: unravelling the link between depression and physical illness

Brenda Penninx, PhD, is professor of psychiatric epidemiology at the department of Psychiatry of Amsterdam UMC (location VUmc) in Amsterdam (https://psychiatryamsterdam.nl). Since 2004 she leads the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA: www.nesda.nl), a longitudinal study of the course and consequences of depressive and anxiety disorders. Prof. Penninx is currently also involved in several other (national and EU-funded) mental health cohort and intervention studies. Central themes in her research are understanding psychosocial, somatic and neurobiological risk factors and consequences of depression and anxiety disorders and how to impact on these to improve mental health. Penninx leads a successful research group involving over 30 junior and senior researchers and has widely published (>800 papers, >60,000 citations). Since 2016, she is elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which she serves currently as Vice-President.

Marieke Klein obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Biology in 2010, followed by a Master’s degree in Medical Biology in 2012 at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. From 2013 onwards, she worked as a PhD student at the department of Human Genetics at the Radboudumc and the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her work focused on the complex genetics of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and ADHD imaging genetics, as well as identifying the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the effect of these genetic variants on disease risk. After her PhD defense in 2019 (cum laude) she continued her work as a post-doctoral researcher at the department of Human Genetics of the Radboudumc in Nijmegen and at the department of Psychiatry of the University Medical Center in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Here she investigated the effects of common genetic factors on aggressive and anti-social behavior and their contribution to brain development. In early 2020, she obtained a NWO Rubicon grant which enabled to her to join the research lab of Professor Jonathan Sebat at the University of California San Diego, USA. There, she investigated how combinations of rare and common genetic variants influence psychiatric traits. After obtaining a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council, she moved back to the Radboudumc Nijmegen, The Netherlands in 2022. She continues to investigate the contribution of different types of genetic variants as well as the role of environmental factors and epigenetic mechanisms in psychiatric disorders.