Francesco Benedetti, MD (University of Modena, 1991) is Head of the Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences research group at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milano, and contract professor of Psychiatry and of General Psychopathology at the University Vita-Salute San Raffaele.

His clinical research group gathers researchers working at the interface between neuroscience and behavioral disorders. Areas of expertise encompass clinical psychobiology, brain imaging, genetics of response to psychiatric treatments, pharmacology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and genetic correlates of psychopathological conditions.

In the last 15 years he and his group have developed clinical chronotherapeutics of mood disorders into a practical, everyday method for the psychiatric ward, particularly focusing on bipolar disorder. Beginning with sleep deprivation, they added sleep phase advance, light therapy, and different medications to see if the rapid response could be maintained. They found that the same gene polymorphisms that hinder clinical response to antidepressants affect the response to chronotherapeutics in a similar fashion. At the functional MRI level, those selective regions of the brain that are modified by improvement on antidepressants also are the ones involved in chronotherapeutic response. These multiple approaches provide an important scientific database to document efficacy and mechanisms of action of non-pharmacological antidepressant methods.

Francesco is a member of CET’s Chronotherapeutics Consultants, and was the major clinical expert in writing our treatment manual, Chronotherapeutics for Affective Disorders.