The Department Genes and Environment at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, led by Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Binder, focuses on stress- and adverse life event-related psychiatric disorders. Their strategy is based on the identification of molecular and cellular consequences of gene-environment interplay followed by the mapping of these signatures to systemic and behavioural changes that associate with risk or resilience to psychiatric symptoms following exposure to adverse life events (from https://t.ly/xeIKl).

In 2022 and 2023, I had the great pleasure to work with Prof. Dr. Binder on the schematics to the left, which depict the labs central strategy as described above, as well as a framework for studying stress, depression, and other mood disorders (circular schematic), published in PNAS in 2023 (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2312662120).