Barbara Franke - Biography#

Barbara Franke studied Biology at the Justus Liebig Universitaet in Giessen, Germany and the University of Utrecht. She finished her Master's Degree in Molecular and Chemical Biology with the distinction 'cum laude' (1995). Subsequently, she stayed in Utrecht to prepare her PhD-Thesis entitled 'Rap and Ral platelet signaling' in the Laboratory for Physiological Chemistry, which she finished in 1999. Since 1999, she is employed at the Department of Human Genetics of the Radboud University Medical Center (Radboudumc) in Nijmegen, where she made a career from post-doc via Head of Research Lab for Multifactorial Diseases, Assistant Professor and Associate Professor in Molecular Psychiatry (both with a joint affiliation at the Department of Human Genetics and the Department of Psychiatry) to Full Professor of Molecular Psychiatry and PI at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. Currently, she holds the Chair of Molecular Psychiatry. She heads the Division of Genome Research and the Radboud Research Theme Neurodevelopmental Disorders. She was elected to join Academia Europaea in 2015 and is an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities since 2017. Professor Franke’s 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 led two large EU-funded research consortia (Aggressotype and MiND) and currently leads the EU-funded PRIME consortium. She also is a workpackage leader of several other EU-funded consortia (CoCA, Eat2beNICE) and previously led workpackages in three additional EU-funded consortia. 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 the international neuroimaging and genetics collaboration ENIGMA, and is the senior-lead of ENIGMA’s ADHD Working Group. Since 2018, she is one of two leaders of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium’s ADHD Working Group. In 2018, she was also elected to the Board of Directors of the International Society for Psychiatric Genetics. In the same year, she joined the Professional Advisory Board of the patient representation ADHD-Europe. In 2019, she was awarded an honorary Adjunct Professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and an honorary Skou Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark. In 2019, she also was awarded Knighthood in the Order of the Dutch Lion. .

Already during her PhD period, she made significant contributions to science, among which the development of a method for the characterization of a small GTPase (Rap1). The highly cited publication on this new discovery opened up a whole new field of research.

Barbara Franke's current Publons H-index is 72 (Google Scholar = 92). Her papers have been cited over 50 times on average. From 2010 onwards, her work has been cited more than 1000 times per year, with a current >24000 citations in total. Her journal articles are 2.5 times more frequently cited than the world average in her field.