Christoph Kraus

I am a research psychiatrist with a scientific focus on improving biological assessment, diagnosis and therapy of severe forms of mood disorders.

I have been trained in clinical psychiatry at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Currently, I am an attending psychiatrist at the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy. I am certified to practice cognitive behavioral therapy and to apply electroconvulsive therapy. As academic, I completed a PhD-thesis on serotonin and neuroplasticity in the Clinical Neurosciences Program at the Medical University of Vienna working with PET and MRI. In addition, I conducted a postdoctoral research fellowship at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, U.S.A., working on resting state fMRI markers of Major Depressive Disorder.

My aims are to improve clinical diagnosis and treatments of severely ill patients with psychiatric neuroscience. Thereby, I use neurobiological information on the brain’s structure and function gained by invasive and non-invasive assessments. For example, reliable diagnostic and therapeutic markers are urgently needed to inform patients, their relatives and healthcare providers on disease severity and future outcomes of depression.

I have a special interest in finding novel therapeutics, whereby the safety assessment of psychedelics is one of my current research goals.

May 2021