Brenda Penninx is Professor ‘psychiatric epidemiology’ at the Department of Psychiatry of the Amsterdam UMC, Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands.
Her focus is on cross-disciplinary mental health research which integrates psychiatry, psychology, neuroimaging, genomics, psychoneuroendocrinology, sociology and behavioural medicine. She founded the multi-site, longitudinal Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (www.nesda.nl), an invaluable research resource for psychiatry which data have been used in >100 PhD-theses and >800 publications. Her work is exemplary in transforming and enhancing the value of longitudinal cohort studies to better understand the multi-nature origin and longitudinal trajectories of stress-related disorders. The funding of the Mood and Resilience in Offspring (MARIO, www.mario.nl) project has extended this research to transgenerational approaches.

Themes of Penninx’s research program encompass:

  1. Examination of the role of psychosocial, neurobiological and genetic factors in etiology and course of depression and anxiety disorders;
  2. Examination of disorder heterogeneity and treatment response variability to advance development and testing of new treatments.

For this, she embeds big-data ‘omics’ and real-world ambulatory assessments of behaviour and emotions in her studies. Her work on immunometabolic depression provides novel insights into depression’s heterogeneity and helped to pave the way towards designing new personalised interventions.

Funded through prestigious national or EU-grants, she currently investigates novel lifestyle (e.g. exercise and nutritional) interventions and focus on stress assessment and intervention in daily life (Stress in Action project, www.stress-in-action.nl).

Her research group consists of 4 Assistant Professors, 6 Post-doc fellows, and 20 PhD students. Over 60 PhD students obtained their PhD-degree under the supervision of Penninx. Brenda Penninx published over 900 publications, which are well cited (H-index >150).

In 2016, Penninx was elected member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Arts, of which she serves as vice-president since 2022.