Rate My Professor Gunter Schumann

Gunter Schumann, MD PhD, is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Centre for Population Neuroscience and Stratified Medicine (PONS) at the Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence (ISTBI), Fudan University, Shanghai. He concurrently heads PONS at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. His academic career features the Chair in Biological Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London from 2011 and Chair in Addiction Biology there from 2005. Earlier appointments include Consultant Psychiatrist and Head of the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at the Central Institute for Mental Health, University of Heidelberg from 2000, Resident and Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at University Medical Center Freiburg from 1995, Resident in Internal Medicine and Research Fellow in Molecular Hematology at University Medical Center Freiburg from 1993, and Research Fellow in Pathology at Harvard Medical School’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 1991.

Professor Schumann specializes in biological psychiatry, advancing stratified medicine to improve diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders, including addictions, by identifying neurobehavioural phenotypes and biomarkers. His interdisciplinary research integrates neuroimaging, functional genetics, epigenetics, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. He coordinates the IMAGEN longitudinal imaging genetics cohort on reinforcement-related behaviour, the cVEDA international consortium on vulnerability to externalizing disorders and addictions, serves on the steering group of the ENIGMA imaging meta-analysis consortium, and leads the AlcoGen consortium on alcohol genetics. Key initiatives under his leadership include the ERC-funded STRATIFY project for precision psychiatry classification, the GIGA consortium with up to 195,000 participants and over 25,000 neuroimaging scans from China, India, Europe, and the U.S., and the Horizon Europe environMENTAL project on environmental impacts on brain health and mental disorders. Author of over 150 publications in journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS, JAMA Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, and The Lancet Global Health—including 'Precision medicine and global mental health' (2019)—he has secured over €40 million in funding. Awards encompass the Alexander von Humboldt Prize (2021), ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (2016), National Thousand Talents Award (2020), Wilhelm Feuerlein Research Award of the German Addiction Foundation (2005), and European College of Neuropharmacology Project Award (1998). He chairs the Nature Commission on Environment, Brain and Mental Health (2024) and was elected to Academia Europaea (2025).