Professor Bernhard Baune (PhD, MD, MPH, FRANZCP) is Cato Chair and Head of the Department of Psychiatry at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Professor Baune is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrist (FRANZCP), Australia.
Professor Baune’s strong background using preclinical rodent models and in translational research places his integrative research approach at the interface between clinical research, psychiatric neuroscience and molecular psychiatry, stimulating forward and backward translational research in the etiology and pathophysiology of major psychiatric disorders.
He leads an extensive research program into personalised psychiatry, prediction and biomarker research in psychiatry and treatment response prediction and in neuroimmunology. Key research achievements include an in-depth understanding of the interaction between the immune and nervous system, the development of a systems biology approach for response prediction and the establishment of innovative personalised clinical trials in major psychiatric disorders. He has a particular interest in cognitive function and psychosocial function in psychiatric disorders and in the severe course of mental illness, treatment response and recovery. Professor Baune designs and conducts personalised randomised clinical trials that take clinical and biological information into account to inform treatments. He is developing novel pharmacological and psychological treatments for improving emotion processing, cognitive function and functional outcomes in mood disorders.
Bernhard’s translational work aims to make real-world differences to the lives of people with mental illness by integrating neurobiological and clinical information, by personalising treatments and by targeting the mechanisms of functional recovery.
Bernhard currently leads an international study on the genomics of cognitive function in depression; in addition, he founded and directs an international consortium on the genomics of severe depression and response to ECT in affective disorders (GenECT-ic) and leads an international research network on transnosological pharmacogenomics and transcriptomics of treatment response. His research is nationally and internationally funded and he has published more than 470 peer-reviewed articles, reviews and book chapters, edited several text books in Psychiatry, and most recently the books Personalised Psychiatry and Inflammation and Immunity of Depression. He is member of numerous editorial boards of international Journals in Psychiatry and related fields.
Please join us in welcoming Bernhard to the Florey. We look forward to his contributions to our research and the new opportunities he will bring to the Florey and the broader precinct.
