Speakers

Professor Michael Berk is currently a NHMRC Senior Principal research Fellow, and is Alfred Deakin Chair of Psychiatry at Deakin University and Barwon Health, where he heads the IMPACT Strategic Research Centre. He also is an Honorary Professorial Research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry, the Florey Institute for Neuroscience and Mental Health and Orygen Youth Health at Melbourne University, as well as in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University. He is past president of the International Society for Bipolar disorders and the Australasian Society or Bipolar and Depressive Disorders. He is an ISI highly cited researcher who has published over 700 papers predominantly in mood disorders.  His major interests are in the discovery and implementation of novel therapies, and risk factors and prevention of psychiatric disorders. He is the recipient of a number of grants, including National Institutes of Health (US), Simon Autism Foundation, NHMRC CRE and project grants, Beyondblue, Stanley Medical Research Institute awards and is a lead investigator in a Collaborative Research Centre.

Prof Michael A Crawford PhD, FSB, FRCPATH, Imperial College, London. Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition. Department of Cancer and Surgery, Division of Reproductive Physiology, Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.

Research Interests:
Professor Crawford has been the Director of the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition since 1990. Having worked in the East-end of London on maternal nutrition and health with Newham, the Homerton and Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, he is now at Reproductive Physiology at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Campus of Imperial College, London.  His special interest lies is in the role that lipids and essential fatty acids play in interacting with the cellular signaling systems, i.e. the key interaction between nutrition affecting membrane lipids and gene expression.

He has published over 300 peer reviewed papers and 3 books.  Amongst his several honours and prizes, he was elected by his peers to the Hall of Fame at the Royal Society of Medicine in 2010. He collaborates in research internationally and is much in demand as a lecturer worldwide.

From 1960-65 Professor Crawford was at the Makerere Medical School in Kampala, Uganda, during which time he studied the nutritional factors linked to endomyocardial fibrosis, which was common there. He also offered a nutritional explanation as to why the incidence of bladder cancer was different in different parts of East Africa. In 1963 he was one of the founders of the Medical College at Muhimbili Hospital in Dar-es-Salaam. He retained his research group at Makerere until 1972, when the position became impossible.

At the Nuffield Institute of Comparative Medicine (1965-89) Professor Crawford equipped and computerised his laboratory to engage in lipid nutrition and showed that deprivation of the essential fatty acids used for the brain’s structure and function resulted in loss of brain cell number in the third generation. In 1972 Crawford and Sinclair published the first description of the dependence of the brain on arachidonic and docosahexaenoic acids and drew attention to the evolutionary implications. Crawford also demonstrated clear evidence of maternal nutrition being a causative factor in low birthweight and complications or prematurity.
Having reported evidence that the brain required arachidonic and docosahexaenoic acid specifically, for its growth, structure and function in 1972, his work has focused first on testing the evidence, the specificity and the requirement. Attention is now directed on establishing  (i) the biological reason for the uniqueness of docosahexaenoic acid in neural signaling systems which stretched unchanged over the 500- 600 million years of evolution and  (ii) the application of this knowledge to the prevention and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders.

Recent Honours:
Professor Crawford has been awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, October 2015, Tokyo, Japan and the CHEVREUL medal in 2015 for his outstanding contribution to the identification of DHA as an important determinant in the evolution of the human brain and its fundamental role in brain growth and development. He was elected as Freeman of the City of London, 11th May 2017.

For more details of Michaels work, and his tireless campaign to improve mental health and wellbeing by improving nutrition of the mother, see The Mother and Child Foundation

Professor John F. Cryan is Professor & Chair, Dept. of Anatomy & Neuroscience, University College Cork and serves on the University’s Governing Body.  He is also a Principal Investigator in the APC Microbiome Institute. He received a B.Sc. (Hons) and PhD from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. He was a visiting fellow at the Dept Psychiatry, University of Melbourne, Australia, which was followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California. He spent four years at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Basel Switzerland, as a LabHead, Behavioural Pharmacology prior to joining UCC in 2005.

Prof. Cryan’s current research is focused on understanding the interaction between brain, gut & microbiome and how it applies to stress, psychiatric and immune-related disorders at key time-windows across the lifespan. Prof. Cryan has published over 300 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He is a Senior Editor of Neuropharmacology and of Nutritional Neuroscience and an Editor of British Journal of Pharmacology. He is on the editorial board of a further 15 journals. He has edited three books including Microbial Endocrinology: The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in Health and Disease (Springer Press, 2014). He has received numerous awards including UCC Researcher of the Year in 2012; the University of Utrecht Award for Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research in 2013 and being named on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher list in 2014. He was a TEDMED speaker in Washington in 2014 and spoke at WIRED Health in London in 2015. He is President-elect of the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society.

Marlene P. Freeman, M.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. She is the Associate Director of the Perinatal and Reproductive Psychiatry Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Medical Director of the MGH Clinical Trials Network and Institute (CTNI).

Dr. Freeman completed medical school at Northwestern University Medical School. She completed residency at the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Program and a research fellowship in the Biological Psychiatry Program at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Her research and clinical expertise is in the areas of mood disorders and women’s mental health.

She is Vice Editor-in-Chief for The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. She was a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and chaired the APA Task Force on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and was a member of the APA’s workgroup on Major Depressive Disorder treatment guidelines. She is on the Board of Directors of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology (ASCP) and is a Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). She recently served as a Member of the Veterans Administration Reproductive Mental Health Steering Committee.

CAPT Joseph R. Hibbeln, M.D is the Acting Chief, Section of Nutritional Neurosciences, Laboratory of Membrane Biophysics and Biochemistry, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism NIH, Bethesda Maryland.

CAPT Hibbeln, M.D. is internationally recognized for originating the field of omega-3 fatty acids in depression and impulsive disorders. The 20th century dramatically changed the dietary oils that comprise the brain creating deficiencies in marine long chain omega-3 fatty acids and excesses in vegetable oil omega-6 fatty acids. Under his direction, the Section on Nutritional Neurosciences examines the impact these deficiencies and excesses on adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes and risks for major depression, suicide, addictive and pain disorders. SNN comprehensively integrates data from epidemiological, nutrigenomic, basic and clinical science perspectives to best formulate actionable interventions that will improve public health. SNN seeks to determine if resuming historically normal intakes of these essential fats might substantially reduce emotional distress in modern societies, with a specific focus on Military and Veteran mental health.
CAPT Hibbeln’s work establishing the net nutritional benefits of fish consumption over risks of trace mercury exposure in pregnancy (Lancet 2007) has changed in international policy regarding dietary advice: (World Health Organization 2010, US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 and 2015, FDA-Net Effects Document/draft advice, 2014, European Food Standards Agency, 2014). His team recovered and published missing data from two of the largest RCTs ever conducted for omega-6 fats in cardiovascular disease (2013, 2016). Both studies demonstrated increased cardiovascular mortality resulting from lower serum cholesterol with linoleic acid from vegetable oil sources.

CAPT Hibbeln is the recipient of numerous awards including the Wilhelm Normann Metal in 2012. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has received more than 35 grants or awards for research funding and continuous funding since 1998 in the Intramural Program of NIAAA. He is board certified physician in psychiatry, serves in the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and is an Eagle Scout, BSA.

Professor Felice Jacka is founder and president of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research (ISNPR) and president of the Australian Alliance for Prevention of Mental Disorders. She is an NHMRC Career Development Fellow and Principal Research Fellow at Deakin University in Australia, within the School of Medicine. She also holds Honorary Principal Research Fellow appointments at the Centre for Adolescent Health, Murdoch Children’s Research Centre; The University of Melbourne; and the Black Dog Institute in NSW.

During and since her PhD, conferred in 2009, Professor Jacka has pioneered a highly innovative program of research that examines how individuals’ diets, and other lifestyle behaviours, interact with the risk for mental health problems. This research is being carried out with the ultimate goal of developing an evidence-based public health message for the primary prevention of the common mental disorders. She has published >115 peer-reviewed papers, the majority in high-impact journals in the mental health field including the American Journal of Psychiatry, World Psychiatry, BMC Medicine, Schizophrenia Bulletin and Lancet Psychiatry.  Profressor Jacka has been awarded >AU$892k in Australian and international awards, prizes and Fellowships and more than one million dollars in research grant funding as lead investigator since 2013. In addition to other epidemiological studies, she currently leads the first RCT to examine the impact of dietary improvement in patients with major depression.

Dr Alan C. Logan obtained his Doctorate from the fully-accredited Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine where he graduated as valedictorian. For the last decade he has been an invited faculty member within the mind-body medicine courses offered at Harvard’s School of Continuing Medical Education. Here, he presents on nutrition and mental health, as well as natural environments in the context of health promotion. He contributed to Harvard School of Public Health’s recent Natural Environments Initiative position statement, and is a co-author within the upcoming Oxford Textbook of Nature and Public Health (Oxford University Press).

With a commitment to the scientific exploration of biopsychosocial influences in health, and a 14-year history of writing academic articles co-authored by university-based physicians and scientists, his background is such that collaboration is the rule, not the exception. Alan has been published in over 2-dozen diverse scientific/medical journals, ranging from Aquatic Biosystems and Beneficial Microbes, to Lancet Psychiatry and Pathophysiology. His focus has been on nutrition, microbiota, and natural environments, particularly as they pertain to mental health. He is co-author of Your Brain on Nature (Harper Collins, 2012).

Professor Susan Prescott is a Professor of Paediatrics in the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at University of Western Australia. She is also a Paediatric Allergist and Immunologist at the Perth Children’s Hospital, and Founding Director of the ORIGINS Project at the Telethon KIDS Institute.

Her interests and expertise are focused around early life risk factors for inflammation as an antecedent (and preventive target) for a broad range of noncommunicable diseases (NCD), with a particular interest in early onset NCDs such as allergic disease. She works at the highest international level of her field, and is a former Director of the World Allergy Organisation.

Prof Prescott is founding President of the multidisciplinary ‘DOHaD’ Society in Australia and New Zealand (Developmental Origins of Health and Disease). She also founded and continues to chair the International Inflammation Network (‘in-FLAME’), an interdisciplinary research network with over 200 members from more than 50 partner institutions.

She has over 250 scientific publications, and is also author of several books: The Allergy Epidemic – a Mystery of Modern Life, The Calling, and Origins – Early Life Solutions to the Modern Health Crisis, and most recently The Secret Life of Your Microbiome: Why Nature and Biodiversity are Essential to Health and Happiness.

Dr Richardson is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University; and Founder Director of the UK charity Food And Behaviour (FAB) Research.

Her 90+ publications include pioneering clinical trials of omega-3 for ADHD, dyslexia and related conditions. She teaches and lectures widely on nutritional neuroscience, psychology and psychiatry, and is a frequent media contributor.

Professor Jerome Sarris is Professor of Integrative Mental Health and Deputy Director of the NICM integrative medicine research institute at Western Sydney University. He holds an NHMRC Clinical Research Fellowship, in addition to an honorary position at the University of Melbourne, Department of Psychiatry as a Principal Research Fellow. Jerome moved from clinical practice as a Naturopath, Nutritionist, and Acupuncturist to academic work, and completed a doctorate at the field of psychiatry. He has a particular interest in anxiety and mood disorder research pertaining to integrative medicine, nutraceutical psychopharmacology and psychotropic plant medicines, and lifestyle medicine. His research also utilises genomic technology to examine the pharmacogenomics of individual responses to nutraceuticals in the treatment of psychiatric disorders.

Professor Sarris has over 120 publications and has published in many eminent journals in the field including The American Journal of Psychiatry, Lancet Psychiatry, and World Psychiatry. He is currently involved in over a dozen clinical trials in the area of mental health, being Chief Investigator A on 3 multicentre NHMRC Project Grants in the field. Jerome is a founding Vice Chair of The International Network of Integrative Mental Health & an Executive Committee Member of the International Society of Nutritional Psychiatry Research.

Professor Kuan-Pin Su is a Professor of Psychiatry and the Chairman of Graduate Institute of Neural & Cognitive Sciences of China Medical University (CMU), Taichung, Taiwan. In 2008, he received his PhD and became the Honorary Faculty of the Institute of Psychiatry-King’s College London. His research has connected bedside to bench with novel interdisciplinary approaches of neuroimages and genomic, cellular and molecular biology, by integrating clinical significance with the investigation of basic sciences. His significant contribution on the role of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) is opening the excitement and innovation of therapeutic strategies and has provided major insights into the biological mechanisms of depression. For example, he is a pioneer to conduct double-blind, placebo-controlled, trials of omega-3 PUFAs in major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder, and published the first RCT to demonstrate omega-3 PUFAs’ antidepressant effects in pregnant women with MDD.

He has received prestigious research awards from professional societies, including Professor Robert Kerwin International Award from the British Association for Psychopharmacology (UK, 2008), the NARSAD Young Investigator Award (USA, 2008-2010), the International Society for the Study of Fatty Acids and Lipids (ISSFAL) New Investigator Award (2010 & 2012), the National Science Council Ta-You Wu Memorial Award (2011), GlaxoSmithKline Depression and Anxiety Award (2011), Thomson Reuters Research Front Awards (2011), Pacific Rim Psychiatrist College Young Psychiatrists Award (2012), Psychopharmacology Award from the British Association for Psychopharmacology (2013) and (ISSFAL) Early Career Award (2016). In the future, Prof Su will keep looking for the novel remedy for depression and the understanding to interface for mind and body.

Professor Almudena Sánchez-Villegas is Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria since 2016. Research Fellow in the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health during the academic year 2005-2006. She is author of more than 80 book chapters and co-editor of several text books of Public Health (Elsevier 2013) and Biostatistics (Elsevier 2014). She has authored more than 130 scientific articles, editorials or letters in international peer-reviewed journals such as World Psychiatry, JAMA Psychiatry, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Diabetes Care or BMC Medicine (h index web of Science=34; h index Google Scholar=44, January 2017). Coordinator and principal investigator of two Spanish Projects (2005/2007; 2009/2012) sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Health (FIS PI042241, FIS PI080819) to assess the role of diet and physical activity on mental disorders and quality of life. In 2016, she received a new grant (FIS PI16/01274) for the triennium 2017/2019 to carry out a clinical trial to assess the role of the adherence to the Mediterranean diet supplemented with tree nuts and extra virgin olive oil in the risk of recurrence of depression. She has also participated in other Spanish or European projects related to nutritional epidemiology such as the PREDIMED clinical trial analysing the effect of Mediterranean diet on cardiovascular risk or the EURRECA project (European RECommendations Aligned Harmonising nutrient recommendations across Europe) sponsored by the European Union (FP6-0361196-2). Now part of CIBERobn (Spanish Biomedical Research Centre in Obesity Physiopathology and Nutrition network) collaborating within the PREDIMED-PLUS trial.

Professor Marjolein Visser is a nutritionist and epidemiologist and professor of Healthy Aging with specific attention to nutrition and clinical dietetics at the Department of Health Sciences of the VU University in Amsterdam, as well as the Department of Internal Medicine, VU Medical Center. Her research interests are nutritional and other lifestyle determinants of healthy aging. Important research areas are malnutrition, obesity, sarcopenia and depression. She is involved in (inter)national aging studies and lifestyle intervention studies and is a member of the Health Council of the Netherlands.

Professor Visser is the coordinator of two large EU consortia: MooDFOOD, focusing on the role of nutrition in the prevention of depression, and PROMISS, focusing on the prevention of malnutrition in older adults. She has authored over 230 scientific publications (H-index 70) and serves on the editorial boards of several international scientific journals.

Emily Deans, M.D. is an adult psychiatrist and Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry, Part Time at Harvard Medical School. She was Chief Resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Program and currently works in outpatient psychiatry in Norwood, Massachusetts. She speaks internationally about food and mood and writes on her blog, “Evolutionary Psychiatry” at Psychology Today.

Dr. David Mischoulon graduated in 1994 from the combined MD-PhD program at Boston University School of Medicine. He earned a PhD in biochemistry during this time, and authored several original papers in the area of liver biochemistry. He completed an internship in General Medicine at Carney Hospital in 1995. He then entered the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program, from which he graduated in 1998, after serving as Chief Resident in Psychopharmacology. Dr. Mischoulon is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and Director of Research and Alternative Remedy Studies at the Depression Clinical and Research Program of the MGH.

Dr. Mischoulon’s research has focused on various areas of depression, including complementary and alternative medicine. He is also an accredited medical acupuncturist and has carried out studies of acupuncture as a treatment for depression. He has received two NARSAD Young Investigator awards, a K-23 award from NCCAM, an R01 grant from the NIH to study omega-3 fatty acids for depression, and recently a UG3 from NCCIH to continue his work on omega-3 fatty acids for depression. Dr. Mischoulon has mentored many research fellows and junior faculty, including investigators from Europe, Asia, and Australia, who have gone on to obtain independent funding as principal investigators.

Dr Natalie Parletta is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of South Australia and a practising Dietitian/Nutritionist at the Centre for Health and Wellbeing in Adelaide. For over 10 years her research has focussed on links between nutrition and mental health, including clinical trials investigated the effects of omega-3 fatty acids on learning and behaviour in children with ADHD and learning difficulties, cognition and mood in elderly people, and more recently the effects of the Mediterranean diet on mental health. She has completed a pilot study of the Mediterranean diet in people with serious mental illness, and more recently one of the first randomised controlled trials in people with depression.

Prof Julia Rucklidge is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand and Director of the Mental Health and Nutrition Research Group

Julia investigates the role of micronutrients in the expression and treatment of psychiatric symptoms, including ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, and anxiety, stress and PTSD associated with the Canterbury earthquakes

Drew Ramsey, M.D. is a board certified adult psychiatrist with specialization in the treatment of mood disorders and anxiety using integrative psychiatry and nutrition, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology. Dr. Ramsey teaches and supervises clinical evaluation, nutritional psychiatry, and psychotherapy as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. He has been in active clinical practice for 15 years. He is currently the Chairman of the Communications Council of the American Psychiatric Association.

Dr. Ramsey frequently speaks and conducts workshops nationally on nutrition and mental health, including two TEDx talks BrainFork and Brain Farmacy. His work and writing have been featured by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Lancet Psychiatry, and NPR, which named him a “kale evangelist.” He is the author of Eat Complete (HarperWave 2016), 50 Shades of Kale (Harperwave 2013) and The Happiness Diet (Rodale 2011).