uu77

Barbara Franke is Professor of Molecular Psychiatry at uu77 in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She is the head of the Department of Medical Neuroscience at uu77 Medical Center (Radboudumc) and a member of the Strategy Board of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, and Academia Europaea.

Educated in Giessen (Germany) and Utrecht (The Netherlands), she obtained her PhD in molecular signal-transduction in Utrecht before joining uu77. Her research is focused on understanding the genetic contribution to neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders, especially ADHD and its comorbidities. Beyond gene-finding, she uses complementary approaches (bioinformatics, i-neurons, small animal models, neuroimaging genetics) to map biological pathways from gene to disease. She has obtained prestigious grants, including a personal Vici grant from the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research and several EU consortium grants. She founded and coordinates the International Multicentre persistent ADHD Collaboration (IMpACT) and the ECNP Network ‘ADHD across the Lifespan’, is a co-founder of ENIGMA, and is one of two leaders each of ENIGMA’s ADHD Working Group and the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium’s ADHD Working Group. In 2018, she was elected to the Board of Directors of the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics. Since 2019, she holds an honorary Adjunct Professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Barbara Franke has (co-)authored over 500 peer reviewed publications.

• Development and lifelong plasticity