Prof. Barbara Franke is Professor of Molecular Psychiatry at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She is the 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 she was granted knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion.
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 conditions, 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.
Throughout her career, she formulated her own ambition as contributing to improving healthcare for people with psychiatric conditions. She aims to do so through her work on clarifying the biology of such conditions as well as by bringing together researchers across disciplines to work together on integrating knowledge across multiple levels, from molecular to clinical. She has obtained prestigious grants, including a personal Vici grant from the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research and several interdisciplinary 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 (the currently 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. From 2018 to 2023, she was an elected member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics, since 2024, she is a member of the Executive Board of ECNP-Neuroscience Applied.
Since 2019, she holds an honorary Adjunct Professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany as well as an honorary Skou Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark. Barbara Franke has (co-)authored over 550 peer-reviewed publications.