Multidimensional Modeling of Resilience and Vulnerability to Psychopathology

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Nathalie Holz
• Subject Area: Biological Psychiatry
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 565884245

Encountering environmental adversities may increase the risk of developing psychiatric disorders. Yet the mechanisms underlying why some individuals develop psychopathology while others do not remain unclear. This is also attributable to the lack of established markers to quantify vulnerability and resilience. Our research project aims to fill this gap by exploring and modelling the heterogeneous responses individuals have to adverse experiences and uncovering the neurobiological mechanisms at play. We plan to achieve this by leveraging large data cohorts and employing advanced deep learning technologies. Specifically, our modeling framework will: i) map mental health outcomes to adversity using a normative model to clarify the relationship between adversity and mental health, ii) identify individual risk and resilience markers by quantifying deviations from this normative model, iii) integrate these deviations with multimodal brain features to uncover underlying mechanisms and biomarkers. This approach enables the mapping of individual markers of extreme resilience and risk across psychiatric disorders, marking a crucial step towards precision medicine in psychiatry.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Netherlands
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Andre Marquand, Ph.D.