Meet our Keynote and Plenary speakers
Keynote speaker
Eveline Crone, The Netherlands
Social development in youth
Eveline Crone is full professor in developmental neuroscience in society at Erasmus University Rotterdam and professor of neurocognitive developmental psychology at Leiden University. Her Society, Youth and Neuroscience Connected (SYNC) lab examines the psychological and neural processes involved in self-regulation and social development from birth to adulthood, with a special focus on adolescence. Her research relies strongly on neuroscience and translational approaches, involving societal partners and youth in the full research cycle. One of her special interests involves enrichment of cognitive and social experiences of children and adolescents using longitudinal, training and intervention designs. Eveline and her team regularly publish in leading international journals (> 200 international articles). She currently leads the 10-year Growing Up Together in Society (GUTS) Gravitation programme (2023-2033), a large-scale multi-site programme on adolescent neural and social development.
Eveline is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), corresponding fellow of The British Academy and member of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS). She is the president of the international flux society for developmental cognitive neuroscience and former vice-president for social sciences and humanities of the scientific council of the European Research Council (ERC), the European Commission’s flagship programme for excellent science. She has been awarded several prestigious research grants and recognitions including the Spinoza award for her research on the adolescent brain. The Spinoza award is the highest recognition in Dutch science.
In addition to her scientific work, Eveline has been successfully communicating her findings to the general public. In 2018 she published the revision of the Dutch book 'The adolescent brain' for a wide audience, of which over 100,000 copies have been sold. The book has been translated into six languages. In this book, she explains the influence of brain development on learning, risk-taking and the social relations and friendships of adolescents.
Plenary Speakers
We will again have six Plenary Lectures as part of the scientific programme. Our confirmed speakers so far are:
Antoine Adamantidis, Canada
Your brain on sleep: linking neural activity to mental health
Antoine Adamantidis was born in Tourcoing, France and grew up in Belgium. The University of Liege, Belgium awarded him a PhD in 2005 for his doctoral thesis on the characteristics of the physiological function of melanin-concentrating hormone receptors in mice. From 2006 to 2008 he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University of Medicine, USA, and from 2008 to 2010 he worked as a research assistant for the department of psychiatry and biological sciences at Stanford University of Medicine, USA. In 2010 he moved to the department of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he founded a laboratory on optogenetic dissection of sleep-wake stages. Since 2014 he has been professor of neurophysiology systems at the University of Bern and director of the center for experimental neurology at the Neurology Clinic University Hospital Bern.
Danielle Posthuma, The Netherlands
News on the genetics of psychiatric conditions from one of the leaders in the field
Danielle Posthuma is a statistical geneticist and head of the department complex trait genetics at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and Amsterdam University Medical Center, Neuroscience Campus Amsterdam. She is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of sciences and the Royal Holland Society of sciences and humanities. In 2021 she received the Mensa Foundation Prize, which is awarded biennially for the best scientific discovery in the field of intelligence or creativity. She holds an advanced grant from the European Research Council and leads the Dutch BRAINSCAPES consortium which aims to bridge genetics and neuroscience and which was awarded EUR 19.6M in 2019 by the Dutch government. Her work focuses on developing novel methods that aid in detecting genes for brain diseases, interpreting these findings in biological context and generating mechanistic hypotheses that can be tested in functional experiments. She has recently led several large scale genome-wide association studies for Alzheimer’s disease, intelligence, insomnia and neuroticism, and is the lead author on innovative tools such as MAGMA (for gene-set analyses) and FUMA (for postGWAS annotation). She has (co-)authored > 250 papers in scientific journals including Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience and Nature Genetics.
Monday 9 October, 10.15-11.00
Henrik Larsson, Sweden
ADHD epidemiology using real-world data from Sweden and beyond: key findings and future directions
Henrik Larsson is professor of psychiatric epidemiology at Örebro University and affiliated researcher at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. He has, for the past 20 years, been PI and co-investigator on national (e.g. Swedish research council) and international (e.g., NIH, Welcome Trust) grants, focusing on how genes and environment influence mental health problems across the life span, the interplay between mental and physical health, developmental trajectories and consequences of mental health across the lifespan and benefits and risks associated with pharmacological treatment interventions. His research use large real-world data and advanced epidemiological approaches, such as causal inference with genetically sensitive designs, prediction modelling, and pharmaco-epidemiology. Henrik is currently the scientific coordinator of a large EU project, TIMESPAN. This Horizon 2020 project focuses on ADHD, treatment discontinuity, and cardiometabolic disease. TIMESPAN involves newly collected real-world data and existing register data from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA, Hong Kong, and Australia. The project uses advanced technologies for data analytics, including causal approaches (e.g., Mendelian randomization), machine learning models (deep neural networks), and pharmaco-epidemiology (e.g., target trial emulation). Henrik has (co-)authored about 600 original peer-reviewed papers, supervised 24 PhD students and has a broad international research and clinical network. He is a member of The International Multicentre persistent ADHD Genetics CollaboraTion (IMpACT), The ECNP ADHD across the Lifespan Network, the Physical And meNtal Health — PAN-Health Thematic Working, and the European Network for Hyperkinetic Disorders (EUNETHYDIS). Henrik is Editor-in-Chief of JCPP Advances.
