Christine Heim is a German psychologist and neuroscientist and Professor and Director of the Institute of Medical Psychology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a position she has held since 2011. She is a Principal Investigator in the NeuroCure Cluster of Excellence at Charité, Fellow of the Max Planck School of Cognition and the International Max Planck Research School on Learning, Institutions, and Future Evolution, Faculty Member of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt University of Berlin, and Principal Investigator in the German Center for Mental Health.
Heim is internationally recognized for her groundbreaking research on early-life adversity, demonstrating how traumatic experiences during childhood development become biologically embedded and shape brain, endocrine, immune, and stress-regulation systems across the lifespan. Her interdisciplinary research integrates psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, immunology, and molecular biology to uncover mechanisms linking early-life stress to mental and physical disorders, particularly depression and other stress-related diseases. Through this work, she has introduced a widely recognized neurodevelopmental perspective into psychiatry and medicine, highlighting the socio-biological foundations of mental and somatic disorders.
She has authored more than 200 scientific publications with over 50,000 citations and has received multiple international awards for her contributions to stress and mental health research. Heim is an elected member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
