Sophia Frangou

Sophia Frangou (Σοφία Φράγκου) is Reader in Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London where she heads the Neurobiology of Psychosis section. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) and Vice-President for Research of the International Society for Bipolar Disorders. She is secretary and founding member of the EPA NeuroImaging section and heads the Brain Imaging Network of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology. She is one of the three Editors of European Psychiatry, the official Journal of the European Psychiatric Association. She has also served on the Council of the British Association for Psychopharmacology.

Biography
Frangou graduated from the Medical School of the University of Athens, Greece in 1989. She then moved to the UK where she trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, London. She obtained her Masters Degree in Neuroscience from the University of London, UK and trained in the USA as a research fellow at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University She returned to the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London where she completed her PhD on neuroimaging and electrophysiological markers of familial vulnerability to schizophrenia. She works as a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and leads her own research group at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.

Research
Frangou's research focuses on the pathophysiological processes underlying psychosis, with emphasis on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder using clinical, genetic, cognitive and neuroimaging techniques. Her key contributions in the field relate to the neurobiological correlates that influence the age when psychosis becomes clinical apparent and on the functional impact of susceptibility genes for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder on brain structure and function. More recently her work is focused on the examination of biological processes that determine resilience to mental illness and differentiate bipolar disorder from schizophrenia.

In parallel Frangou is also interested in the standardisation of cognitive test batteries for the assessment of cognition in psychosis as a means to facilitating large scale international collaborative research such as the ISBD neurocognition initiative ISBD-BANC.

Recent publications

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