Junior Professor Forstner awarded the Jules Angst Research Prize

Junior Professor Dr. Andreas Forstner was awarded the Jules Angst Research Prize 2022 of the German Society for Bipolar Disorders (DGBS). He accepted the award during the annual meeting of the DGBS in Frankfurt.

Forstner has been working as a junior professor for Brain Genomics at the Institute of Human Genetics at the University Hospital Bonn and the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at Forschungszentrum Jülich since November 2020. The prize is awarded for his many years of research into the molecular genetic basis of bipolar disorder, which has provided important insights into the biology underlying the disease. In this context, Jun.-Prof. Forstner has, among other things, been the lead contributor to the two largest genome-wide association studies in bipolar disorder conducted as part of the Bipolar Disorder Working Group of the international Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (Stahl*, Breen*, Forstner*, McQuillin*, Ripke* et al., Nature Genetics, 2019; Mullins*, Forstner* et al., Nature Genetics, 2021). As part of this research, genetic datasets were pooled and jointly analysed at an international level, resulting in the identification of a large number of genes contributing to bipolar disorder.

The Jules Angst Research Prize has been awarded since 2017 and comes with prize money of €3,000. With the prize, the DGBS aims to promote young scientists conducting research on bipolar disorder.