Barbara Franke
Speaker
Radboud University | The Netherlands
Barbara Franke holds the Chair of Molecular Psychiatry at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She is the current director of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour that unites neuroscience research across the Nijmegen campus. Based at the Human Genetics and Psychiatry departments of the Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc), she also heads the Division of Genome Research and the Research Theme Neurodevelopmental Disorders.
Barbara is a molecular biologist and geneticist. She studies the biological contribution to neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders, especially ADHD and its comorbidities. Beyond gene-finding, she uses complementary approaches (bioinformatics, cell-based and small animal models, neuroimaging genetics) to map biological pathways from gene to behaviour and disease. It is her goal to make biological information useful for improving the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of psychiatric disorders. She has published over 500 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is one of the top-experts on ADHD according to Expertscape.
Barbara holds honorary professorships at Goethe University in Frankfurt and at Aarhus University. She is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, and of Academia Europaea.
Barbara is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics (ISPG) as well as the co-lead of the ADHD working groups of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) and the ENIGMA brain imaging consortium. She founded and leads the International Multicentre persistent ADHD Collaboration (IMpACT) and the ECNP Network ‘ADHD across the Lifespan’.
