Barbara Franke

Barbara is Professor of Molecular Psychiatry at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She is Head of the Department of Medical Neuroscience at Radboud University 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, and was granted knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. She holds an honorary Adjunct Professorship at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as well as an honorary Skou Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Educated in Giessen, Germany, and Utrecht, the Netherlands, she obtained her PhD in molecular signal transduction in Utrecht before joining Radboud University. Her research focuses on understanding the genetic contribution to neurodevelopmental psychiatric conditions, especially ADHD and its comorbidities. Beyond gene-finding, she uses complementary approaches, including bioinformatics, induced neurons, small animal models and neuroimaging genetics, to map biological pathways from gene to disease.

Barbara founded and coordinates the International Multi-centre persistent ADHD CollaboraTion (IMpACT) and the ECNP Network 'ADHD across the Lifespan', is a co-founder of ENIGMA, currently the largest consortium worldwide on neuroimaging and genetics, and is one of two leaders each of ENIGMA's ADHD Working Group and the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium's ADHD Working Group.