Scientific Advisory Board

Professor Mark George

Professor Mark George received his medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston in 1985, where he continued with dual residencies in both neurology and psychiatry. He is board-certified in both areas. Following his residency training, he worked for one year (1990-91) as a Visiting Research Fellow in the Raymond Way Neuropsychiatry Research Group at the Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London, England. He then moved to Washington, DC, working with Dr. Robert Post in the Biological Psychiatry Branch of the Intramural National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).  During his 4 years at NIMH, he was one of the first to use functional imaging (particularly oxygen PET) and discovered that specific brain regions change activity during normal emotions. This led to work using imaging to understand brain changes that occur in depression and mania. This imaging work directly led to his pioneering use of a non-invasive brain stimulation method, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), as a probe of neuronal circuits regulating mood, and to clinical trials using TMS as an antidepressant. In 1993 while at the NIMH, he discovered that daily prefrontal rTMS over several weeks could treat depression, and ever since he has worked to grow the science of TMS, both in terms of how it works in the brain, and in critically evaluating its therapeutic applications, especially in the area of treating depression.

Professor Frank Padberg

Dr. Padberg is Professor of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy and Director of the Center for Non-invasive Brain Stimulation Munich Augsburg (CNBS^MA) and the Section of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Hospital Munich, Dept. of Psychiatry. His research focus as a clinician scientist is on the development of novel, safe and effective non-pharmacological interventions for difficult-to-treat affective disorders, i.e. therapy-resistant or chronic depression or depression with significant psychiatric co-morbidities (e.g. borderline personality disorder, posttraumatic disorder – complex affective disorders).

Within two research groups, he and his co-workers are currently following different lines of research to achieve this overarching goal: 1) understanding the complexity of affective disorders by characterizing clinical, psychological (e.g. trauma, resilience, attachment, loneliness) and neurobiological features (e.g. oxytocin, HPA regulation) in affective disorders, 2) investigating mechanisms of action in psychotherapy (e.g. of Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy – CBASP), and 3) developing non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) methods (e.g. repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation – rTMS, transcranial direct current stimulation – tDCS) to provide safe and effective therapeutic interventions.

The third research track is most advanced and has been implemented as a translational research program funded by the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, since 2015 German Center for Brain Stimulation – GCBS). But already as a young resident in 1997, Dr. Padberg has got interested in rTMS and published a first small pilot trial on major depressive disorder (MDD) in 1999. The vision of non-invasively stimulating cortical brain regions for providing effective therapy in MDD and other psychiatric disorders has accompanied his work, and nowadays turned to clinical practice. Today, NIBS represents a rapidly developing field of innovation in mental health research. Dr. Padberg widely contributed to this field (e.g. see google scholar: h-index: 62, i10-index: 172, 19972 citations).