Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ToPP (Towards Precision Psychiatry)
Reporting period: 2020-08-01 to 2022-07-31
The intricacies of the human mind and its disorders are one of the remaining modern-day enigmas. Whereas recent advances in brain imaging and genetics are currently changing the clinical neurosciences by identifying novel general mechanisms of complex traits underlying risk and resilience at the group level, our understanding of individual-level causes and mechanisms of mental disorder has remained almost unchanged which is important because clinical management must be performed at the individual level. During the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions-Standard European-Individual Fellowship (MSCA-SE-IF) Thomas Wolfers addressed this challenge by expending the normative modelling framework. During the period of the fellowship Thomas published nine articles with the MSCA-IF acknowledgement with the main outcomes: 1) I developed cognitive and genetic normative models, 2) scaled the normative modelling framework to become relevant for genetic analyses, 3) contributed to deep learning approaches for ageing, transfer learning and disease/disorder predictions, 4) mapped various disorders and diseases, 5) replicated our findings in independent publications 6) contributed to the organisation of various courses and workshops and 7) gave talks at various universities world-wide. This work resulted in a successful application for a research group leader position at the University of Tübingen in Germany. With my emerging “Laboratory for Mental Health Mapping ( https://mhm-lab.github.io )”, I will continue and refine the work started during this fellowship building an independent research line. Thus, the results of this fellowship will be further exploited and developed.
I have published nine articles, contributed to the development of a large database, developed and run various machine learning models for normative modeling, supervised a number of students on various levels, collaborated broadly with partners in Europe and elsewhere, was invited for talks at major Universities around the world and spend my secondment in Oxford.
The work conducted during the fellowship led to an independent research line and my employment as research group leader at a major European research University in Tübingen. In my recently established laboratory for mental health mapping (see homepage), I will further develop the techniques, approaches and philosophy that made this research possible and influential beyond the current state-of-the-art in psychiatry.