2024 Plenary Speakers

Chair of Diversity Panel

Biography

Prof. Henriette Raventós is a ISPG Board of Directors member and directs the University of Costa Rica neuropsychiatric genetics research group. During her career, she has advocated for underrepresented groups in science, aiming to increase global representation and reduce inequalities in psychiatric genetic research.

Co-Chair of Diversity Panel

Prof. Diego Luiz Rovaris is a Tenured Assistant Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, University of São Paulo (ICB-USP), Brazil. With over 13 years of experience in Molecular Psychiatry, his research focuses on ADHD and related phenotypes. He leads the Laboratory of Physiological Genomics of Mental Health at ICB-USP, investigating how environmental factors interact with genomics and epigenomics to affect the risk and progression of mental disorders with varying heritability, such as major depressive disorder and ADHD. He is the scientific head of the Brazilian Research Network on Adult ADHD and co-leads the ADHD working group of the Latin American Consortium (LAGC). He is the Principal Investigator of CONNECT-ADHD (comprehensive exploration of the CONNECTion between ADHD and educational attainment in contrasting environments), a project involved in the Ancestral Populations Network of the National Institute of Mental Health. Committed to promoting diversity, he aims to increase the representation of non-European individuals in genomics collaborations in psychiatry and to enhance the participation of scientists from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in relevant scientific forums.

Biography

Prof. Aïcha Dahdouh is a Professor of Psychiatry in Algeria and head of the Psychiatry-Addictology Department at the Faculty of Medicine in Oran, University Oran 1 Ahmed Benbella. Aïcha currently works in the Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at GHU Paris F-75014, as an Associate Practitioner. Her past and present research focuses on the impact of social practices on the onset and development of mental disorders. Her doctoral thesis is in medical sciences, and it is entitled “Search for Genetic Variants of Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorders in Consanguineous Families in Algeria". A number of particularly relevant genetic results have emerged from this work, and are currently in the process of publication. Aïcha is currently working on addictions among young people in Algeria and associated factors: psychiatric comorbidities and social risk factors (violence against women, maternal depression, childhood abuse and trauma...). She collaborates with the PGC Africa working group on Psychosis and substance use disorders research projects in Africa.

Biography

Prof. Weihua Yue is a Professor of Psychiatry and the Deputy Director of Peking University Sixth Hospital & Institute of Mental Health; National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders (Peking University). Beijing, 100191, P.R. China She has been supported by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and Outstanding Young Scholars, National Key Research and Development Program, etc. Her group secured the Second Prize in Natural Science, awarded by the Ministry of Education. The group focuses on genetic research of schizophrenia. She has published representative articles in Nat Genet (2019, 2011), Lancet Psychiatry, Cell Discov, Mil Med Res, Mol Psychiatry, Biol Psychiatry, Psychiatry Clin Neurosci, and JAMA Netw Open to name a few.

Biography

Prof. Sanjeev Jain is an Emeritus Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Molecular Genetics Laboratory, National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, India. His work has been enquiry into genetic mechanisms of psychoses; and the broader issues of the interfaces between psychopathology and biology. This work connects the clinic to the bench, using advanced cellular and molecular biology methods. As a lead investigator for the Accelerator program for discovery in brain disorders using stem cells (ADBs), the lab created a repository of phenotype data from carefully and comprehensively assessed participants, detailed genetic information, and created iPSC and neuronal lines. This will enable researchers to explore the genetic contributions to these syndromes using family and population-based genetics research and also interrogate the impact of this genetic variation. A Genetic Counselling and Testing Clinic (GCAT clinic) established by the lab provides molecular diagnostics for many syndromes (Huntington’s disease, ataxia, DMD etc.). His work thus looks at the epidemiology of rare variants, and their contributions to disease; as also population-based analyses, with specific reference to India.

Biography

Prof. Michael Ziller is Professor of Functional Genomics in Psychiatry in the Department of Mental Health at the University of Muenster, Germany. He is a trained physicist and bioinformatician and obtained Diploma degrees in both areas in 2010 from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. He pursued his doctoral work at the Department of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Harvard University, receiving his PhD in 2014. From 2016-2021, he was a Principal Investigator at the Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry, Germany before being appointed full Professor in Muenster. His work is focused on understanding the molecular and cellular basis of psychiatric disorders that arises from the complex interplay of common and rare genetic risk factors. To this end, his group combines statistical genetic approaches, induced pluripotent stem cell based personalized disease models, functional genomics and high-content screening paradigms. Ultimately, his group seeks to disentangle the complex genotype-phenotype relationships in psychiatric disorders by integrating new genetic risk-scores with cellular in vitro based endophenotypes to bridge the scales and link them to patient-level intermediate phenotypes.

Biography

Prof. Lin Lu is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degree from the West China University of Medical Sciences in 1999. He undertook postdoctoral research at the National Laboratory of Medical Neurobiology at the Shanghai Medical School of Fudan University and then at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the National Institutes of Health in the USA, where he continued as a research scientist. He currently works as the director of the Peking University Institute of Mental Health/Peking University Sixth Hospital, National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders, National Center for Mental Health of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institute on Drug Dependence in China. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed articles (H-index=90), with his research primarily focusing on elucidating neurobiological mechanisms and clinical interventions pertaining to psychiatric disorders. These include investigating neural mechanisms underlying pathological memory and associated psychiatric disorders through both basic and clinical research, conducting translational research to advance behavioral therapies and neuromodulation techniques for the treatment of psychiatric disorders, as well as addressing public health policies concerning mental health concerns during epidemic periods.

Biography

Prof. Shawn Je is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and Director of the SingHealth Advanced Imaging Centre. He received his B.S. from KAIST, M.S. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience and Genetics from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Graduate Partnership Program through the George Washington University Medical School. He then completed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)/ Duke University Medical School postdoctoral fellowship. He joined the Duke-NUS Medical School as an Assistant Professor in late 2010 and received his tenure in 2017. He received the Scientist of the Year Award from Ministry of Science and ICT, Korea. His research focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Biography

Dr. Heini M Natri is a human geneticist and a functional genomicist interested in the genetic, molecular, and cellular basis of health and disease. They are also an advocate for socially responsible research, particularly in the context of psychiatric, neurodevelopmental, social, and behavioral traits.

Biography

Prof. Brenda Penninx is Professor in Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Department of Psychiatry of the Amsterdam UMC, Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands. Her focus is on cross-disciplinary depression research which integrates psychiatry, psychology, neuroimaging, genomics, psychoneuroendocrinology, sociology and behavioural medicine. She founded the multi-site, longitudinal Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (www.nesda.nl), an invaluable research resource for psychiatry which data have been used in >100 PhD-theses and >900 publications. Her work is exemplary in transforming and enhancing the value of longitudinal cohort studies to better understand the multi-nature origin and longitudinal trajectories of stress-related disorders. Penninx uses cohort data to better understand the role of (interactions between) psychosocial, neurobiological and genetic factors in the etiology and course of depression disorder, and to disentangle the large heterogeneity of depressive disorder. For this, she integrates big-data ‘omics’ including genomics in her studies. Her research is funded through various national, EU- and NIH-grants, and she has supervised over 70 PhD students in obtaining their PhD-degree. In 2016, Penninx was elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Arts, of which she currently serves as Vice President.