Prof. B. Franke (Barbara)

Barbara Franke holds the Chair of Molecular Psychiatry at Radboud University, where she is based at the Human Genetics and Psychiatry departments of the Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc). She is the new chair of the Donders Institute as of 1 January 2022. At Radboudumc, she heads the Division of Genome Research and the Radboud Research Theme Neurodevelopmental Disorders. 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.

Educated in Giessen (Germany) and Utrecht (The Netherlands), she obtained her PhD in molecular signal-transduction in Utrecht before joining Radboud University. 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

• Genetics of Brain Function and (Psychiatric) Malfunction