NCP2
021 Plenary Speakers

Merete Nordentoft

Plenary lecture: Improving treatment of people with psychotic illnesses: lessons from randomized clinical trials

Merete Nordentoft is an expert in epidemiology, suicidal behavior, psychopathology and a pioneer in early intervention in psychosis. She was PI for many large randomized clinical trials, evaluating the effect of psychosocial intervention, of which the Danish OPUS trial (specialized assertive intervention in first episode psychosis) is the most well known.

She has worked with suicide prevention at a national level since 1997.

Together with a group of epidemiologist from Nordic countries, she has proved that life expectancy in schizophrenia is 15 to 20 years shorter than in the general population.

She is involved as one of the PI’s in iPSYCH, the Lundbeck Foundation Initiative for Integrative Psychiatric Research, which aims at investigating genetic and environmental causes of mental disorders. The initiation of the large Danish High Risk and Resilience Study VIA 7, and the first follow-up wave VIA 11 are important parts of iPSYCH. 

She was given the prestigious award “Global Excellence in Health” in 2012 and in 2016. She received the Richard Wyatt Award in 2016, The Marie and August Krogh Award in 2017, and The Danish Medical Association’s Honorific Award in 2018.


Pim Cuijpers

Plenary lecture: The future of psychotherapy

Pim Cuijpers is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is specialised in conducting randomised controlled trials and meta-analyses on prevention and psychological treatments of common mental disorders across the life span. 


Much of his work is aimed at prevention of mental disorders, psychological treatments of depression and anxiety disorders, and Internet-delivered treatments.

Pim Cuijpers has published more than 900 peer-reviewed papers, chapters, reports and professional publications, including more than 700 papers in international peer-reviewed scientific journals. He is on the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science lists of the ‘highly cited researchers’ since the first edition of this list in 2014 (http://highlycited.com/). 

Ian Michael Goodyer

Plenary lecture: Adolescent Mental Health: From Brain to Therapeutics

Professor Emeritus Cambridge Clinical School University of Cambridge

Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge Chairperson, Peter Cundill Research Centre for Youth Depression, Center for Addictions and Mental Health, University of Toronto

I am a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist based at Cambridge University pursuing research into the connections between human development and psychopathology and the therapeutics of adolescent mental disorders. Our research programme uses experimental, computational and neuroimaging approaches embedded in longitudinal designs to measure the effects of the social environment on cognition, brain structures and mental disorders. We described the first biomarker for unipolar depression, elevated morning cortisol, in young adolescents at risk for unipolar depression. We have undertaken randomised controlled trials for treatment of unipolar depression and conduct disorders in young people. 

Our therapeutics research has resulted in a new brief psychosocial intervention (BPI) being adopted by NICE UK as a treatment for unipolar Depression in Adolescents. I have been the recipient of 3 awards for my research and writing from the National Institute of Health UK, British Medical Journal and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. I also won the Association of British Industries community medal for services to Child Mental Health. I was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1999 and awarded the OBE for Psychiatry Research in the New Year Honours list 2017.

Riitta Hari

Plenary lecture: Brain basis of social interaction

Riitta Hari, MD, PhD, is Professor Emerita at Aalto University, Finland. She has a long experience in systems-level neuroscience and human brain imaging, especially in developing magnetoencephalography (MEG) for tracking millisecond-scale activation sequences in the human brain. Hari and her colleagues have provided fundamental insights into human sensory, motor, cognitive, and social functions in both healthy and diseased individuals. For her multidisciplinary efforts, Hari has received honoris causa doctorates in science (2003), medicine (2005), and technology (2016). Hari is Academician of Science in Finland since 2010 and member of the National Academy of Sciences USA since 2004. She currently attempts to bridge art and neuroscience without privileging either.


Mark Daly

Plenary lecture: Genetic architecture of psychiatric traits and disorders - shared and specific biological mechanisms

Mark Daly, PhD, was appointed Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) in February 2018. He retains also his affiliations in Boston at the Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital and as an institute member of the Broad Institute and co-director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics.

Daly received his B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in human genetics from Leiden University, Netherlands. He received the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics in 2014 and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017. In 2019 he was awarded Aarhus University's Honorary Doctorate at the Faculty of Health.

His research primarily focuses on the development and application of statistical methods for the discovery and interpretation of genetic variation responsible for complex human disease.

In addition to foundational work in human genetics methodology, his lab has made major contributions to gene discovery in inflammatory bowel disease, autism and schizophrenia - primarily through catalyzing global collaborative research efforts which he continues to help lead. He is a co-architect of the FinnGen project, a landmark public-private effort to integrate decades of medical registry data with genomic data in 10% of the Finnish population.

Dr Daly coordinates the leadership team of the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative (HGI) (https://www.covid19hg.org). The purpose of the initiative is to bring together the human genetics research community to generate, share, and analyse data to define the genetic determinants of COVID-19 susceptibility, severity, and outcomes.

Mark Daly is an author of 478 peer-reviewed manuscripts (PubMed 8/2020) with a total of more than 290,000 citations, has an h-index of 201 (Google scholar 8/2020), and has been listed by Thompson ISI/Science Watch in 2008 and 2010 as one of the top ten authors ranked by number of high-impact papers.


Dan Chisholm

Plenary lecture: Public mental health needs and responses in the context of COVID-19: a blueprint for the future?

Dr Dan Chisholm is Programme Manager for Mental Health at the WHO Regional Office for Europe (based in Copenhagen, Denmark). He works with WHO Member States and other partners to develop and implement national mental health policies and plans, as well as provide guidance, tools and advocacy for the promotion of mental health and the development of prevention, treatment and recovery services across the life-course.  He was formerly a Health Systems Adviser in the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse at WHO Headquarters Office in Geneva, Switzerland. His main areas of work there included development and monitoring of global mental health plans and activities, technical assistance on mental health system strengthening, and analysis of the cost-effectiveness of strategies for reducing the impact of mental disorders.