Specialist Subject Editor – Molecular Genetics
Professor Barbara Franke holds the Chair of Molecular Psychiatry at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where she is based at the Human Genetics and Psychiatry departments of the Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc). She is also a Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. At Radboudumc, she heads the Division of Genome Research and the Radboud Research Theme Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Since 2019, she also holds an honorary Adjunct Professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Barbara’s research is focused on understanding the genetic contribution to neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders, especially ADHD and autism and their comorbidities. Beyond gene-finding, she uses complementary approaches (bioinformatics, i-neurons, small animal models, neuroimaging genetics) to map biological pathways from gene to disease.
Barbara 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. She has coordinated EU-funded consortium grants and leads work packages in several additional ones. She founded and coordinates the International Multicentre persistent ADHD Collaboration (IMpACT) and the ECNP Network ‘ADHD across the Lifespan’. She is also a co-founder of ENIGMA, and is one of two leaders 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. Barbara has also (co-)authored over 400 peer-reviewed publications and is on Clavirate’s list of the 1% most highly cited researchers.
“I’m honored to have been invited to join the JCPP Editorial Board! Recent biological research in psychiatry teaches us about the dimensionality of the disorders we study and about the importance of a lifespan perspective in child and adolescent psychiatry. Seeing this view reflected in JCPP makes me look forward to being part of the team of editors.”