Winner 2022: Marie Åsberg, Sweden

Marie Åsberg’s career spans over half a century at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, where, in addition to holding a professorship in psychiatry from 1984, she has held multiple leadership positions. In that time she has made multiple pioneering contributions that have fundamentally shaped the field of neuropsychopharmacology.

Her record of remarkable achievement began with her dissertation work on the influence of plasma concentrations on the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs. She demonstrated that, for this class of drugs, treatment guided by dose rather than by plasma concentration resulted in suboptimal treatment. She also established a genetic basis of this variability, laying the groundwork for subsequent research, and identifying functional genetic variation in CYP2D6 and other metabolic enzymes as important biological moderators of treatment responses.