A Global Perspective on Resilience Factors as Moderators of Variability

Ran Barzilay, MD, PhD is a physician-scientist, child and adolescent psychiatrist, with background in translational neuroscience ranging from basic molecular neuroscience to clinical studies. Barzilay's professional life's mission is to enhance the understanding of mechanisms underpinning risk and resilience in major psychiatric disorders in youths who grow up under stress.

As a child psychiatrist Barzilay aspires to ultimately leverage this understanding for advancing preventive and very early interventions in neuropsychiatric disorders in children and adolescents. His research career began studying basic science models of neuronal development working with stem cells, consequently moving to translational studies involving G X E paradigms in animal models of neuropsychiatric disorders. Since starting his clinical training as a child and adolescent psychiatrist in 2012, Barzilay added a clinical perspective to my research, working on stress-related disorders and suicide, and studying the role of inflammation in the development of psychiatric disorders.  He joined the Lifespan Brain Institute (LiBI) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine in 2017, where he pursues his mission of studying developmental trajectories of at-risk youths from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC).

Prof. Gothelf is adult, child and adolescent psychiatrist. He completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Neuroscience Center, Stanford University and is a full professor of psychiatry at Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. Since 2010, Prof. Gothelf has served as director of the Division at Sheba Medical Center. Prof. Gothelf is an international editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles in the field of behavioral neurogenetics, child psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

Dr. Gur is Professor of Psychiatry Neurology and Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine where she directs the Neuropsychiatry Section and the Schizophrenia Research Center and is Vice Chair of Research Development in the Department of Psychiatry. Her combined training in Psychology, Neurology and Psychiatry has provided the tools to pursue an academic career working with basic and clinical neuroscientists to advance the understanding of schizophrenia.

Raffael Kalisch, PhD is trying to unravel the mechanisms underlying resilience to the detrimental effects of adversity on mental health. He does this in small-sample laboratory studies of stress and emotion regulation mechanisms, often involving neuroimaging, as well as in large-sample longitudinal cohort studies in which stressor exposure, mental health, and resilience factors are monitored repeatedly and at high sampling frequency, such as to identify processes of adaptation that allow stressor-exposed individuals to stay mentally healthy. Identification of resilience processes necessitates the development of new data analysis techniques for integration of multimodal data and dynamic modelling.