Brenda Penninx, PhD, is professor of psychiatric epidemiology at the department of Psychiatry of Amsterdam UMC (https://psychiatryamsterdam.nl). Since 2004 she leads the multi-site Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA: www.nesda.nl), a longitudinal study of the course and consequences of depressive and anxiety disorders.
Penninx received >50 M Euro from various national and international (EU or NIH) research grants, including the prestigious personal VIDI and VICI grants. Her current research group (10 assistant professors/ postdocs and >20 PhD students) is very multidisciplinary: persons with diverse backgrounds (psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, epidemiology, mathematics, data science, sociology) together examine the etiology, treatment and consequences of depressive and anxiety disorders. More than 60 students have already obtained their PhD-degree under her supervision. Penninx has published over 1000 international articles. In 2016, Brenda Penninx has been elected as member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Arts (KNAW), of which she serves as Vice-President since 2023.
Central themes in her research are understanding psychosocial, environmental, somatic, genetic and neurobiological risk factors and consequences of depression and anxiety disorders and how to intervene on these to improve mental health. Penninx participates e.g. in the EU-funded MoodFood, Lifebrain, PRISM. RADAR-CNS. Earlycause, To_Aition and Respond projects.
The intergenerational transmission of stress and resilience is studied in the longitudinal multi-site MARIO project. Finally, to better understand the impact of daily-life stress, Penninx recently established the Stress in Action (SiA) Consortium, funded through the Gravitation grant by the Dutch Research Council. Its goal is to enable synergistic collaborations to discover how daily-life stress can be reliably measured, how it determines health, how individual variation impacts on daily-life stress, and how to intervene in a personalized manner on daily-life stress. Penninx is the Coordinator of this Consortium.