Speaker's Profile

Dr. Frank is internationally recognized for the development and testing of a series of somatic and psychosocial treatment approaches for major depression and bipolar disorder. She has now turned her full attention to the development and deployment of scalable, smartphone-based methods for evaluating and treating behavioral disorders.

For more than 35 years, her work focused on a better understanding of mood disorders and their treatment, primarily through the vehicle of randomized controlled trials. Her 1990 study of maintenance therapies in recurrent unipolar depression is now considered a classic in the field. She and her colleagues subsequently demonstrated the preventive efficacy of interpersonal and social rhythm therapy (IPSRT), a psychosocial intervention originally developed for individuals with bipolar disorder, that seeks to stabilize circadian function by increasing the regularity of their daily routines and, thereby, hasten recovery from acute episodes and prevent recurrence.

The rhythm-based theoretical model that underpins IPSRT now forms the basis for the smartphone technology that she and her HealthRhythms colleagues have developed for the monitoring of behavioral biomarkers of psychiatric illness and for intervening with patients to help them achieve the regular sleep/wake and other behavioral rhythms that have now been shown to be associated with long-term wellness whether achieved through face-to-face therapy or through HealthRhythms’ digital intervention platform, Cue™

An internationally recognized expert on mood disorders and their treatment, was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1999. She has published more than 475 peer-review papers, in addition to over 100 book chapters and books and continues to hold the rank of Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She served as a member and then chair of the US Food and Drug Administration Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Panel, as a member of the US National Advisory Mental Health Council and on the Mood Disorders Workgroup of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on DSM-5. In 2021, she received the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

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