In 2016 Professor John McGrath, University of Queensland, was awarded the Niels Bohr Professorship (NBP) from the Danish National Research Foundation.

John McGrath is a psychiatrist and one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of psychiatric epidemiology. His research aims to generate and evaluate non-genetic risk factors for schizophrenia. In particular, he has developed productive cross-disciplinary collaborations linking risk factor epidemiology with developmental neurobiology.

In 2010, John McGrath published a paper that described a link between neonatal vitamin D concentration and the later risk of mental illness in the offspring. This groundbreaking research was done in close collaboration with Professor Preben Bo Mortensen and other leading Danish researchers based at the National Centre for Register-Based Research (NCRR) located at Aarhus University and Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen.

With a grant of 30 million DKK from the Danish National Research Foundation this five year Niels Bohr Professorship will enable John McGrath and his co-investigators to follow up on their recent research, linking vitamin D deficiency in the foetal stage with severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia, and to explore new methods related to psychiatric epidemiology.

In addition to a close collaboration with the Integrative Psychiatric Research (iPSYCH), the Niels Bohr Professorship also works closely with top researchers within the international community including researchers from University of Queensland, senior investigators at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the WHO World Mental Health Survey Initiative based at Harvard University.

Read more about the new collaborate framework: Niels Bohr Professorship - Psychiatric Epidemiology