PROFESSOR | Psychiatry PROFESSOR | Obstetrics,Gynecology and Reproductive Science

Dr Veerle Bergink is Professor at the department of Psychiatry and the department of Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She is internationally recognized as an expert in the treatment of psychiatric disorders during pregnancy and the postpartum period. At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, she will develop and direct a women’s mental health research program. After completing Medical School in the Netherlands (1998), she was trained as a psychiatrist at the university hospital in Utrecht. She started as psychiatrist in 2004 at the Erasmus University hospital in Rotterdam, where she headed the acute inpatient unit, the mother-baby unit and the center of excellence in perinatal psychiatry. Her research career started in 2008 when she established a prospective postpartum psychosis study, currently the largest first-onset postpartum psychosis and mania cohort in the world. She has defined a highly effective clinical treatment algorithm for treatment of the acute phase and also for the prevention of postpartum relapse. Moreover, her research has provided intriguing evidence for an underlying immunological pathophysiology of postpartum depression, mania and psychosis. Since 2014 she is involved in epidemiological studies at the institute of registered based research in Denmark, examining intergenerational psychopathology and medication use during pregnancy. She has been the principle investigator on multiple research project including studies on lithium and antidepressant use during pregnancy, neuroimaging of new mothers and their offspring and the longitudinal course of severe perinatal mood disorders. Her work has been funded by various sources such as the European Union, the Dutch Government and private foundations. Dr Bergink has published extensively in top-tier scientific journals. Two papers were listed as top 10 most important clinical studies in in the entire field of Psychiatry, selected by the publishing group of the NEJM. She received prestigious awards, such as the price for the best research within all faculty in the last three years at Erasmus University and the Ramaer medal from the Netherlands Psychiatric Association, awarded to the person who contributed the most to the field of clinical and scientific Psychiatry over the last 2 years