BARBARA FRANKE

Barbara Franke is Professor of Molecular Psychiatry at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She is the head of the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc). Barbara is one of the internationally leading scientists in the field of biological psychiatry; international collaboration and team science are a strong motivator for her. She leads several international consortia in the field of research into psychiatric conditions and their comorbidity, including the Horizon 2020-funded PRIME consortium. She is also a member of the Coordinating Committee of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) and the co-leader of PGC’s ADHD Working Group, a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics (ISPG), the founder and leader of the International Multicenter persistent ADHD Collaboration (IMpACT) and the ECNP Network ADHD across the lifespan, and a cofounder of the international ENIGMA Consortium on neuroimaging and brain genetics. She holds honorary professorships at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and at Aarhus University in Denmark. Barbara is a molecular biologist and geneticist by training. She studies the biological contribution to neurodevelopmental conditions, especially ADHD, and their mental and somatic comorbidities in children and adults. Beyond gene-finding, she uses complementary approaches (bioinformatics, cell-based and small animal models, and 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 conditions and to contribute to their re-conceptualization.