Josselin Houenou

Professor Josselin Houenou serves as Professor of Psychiatry at Northern Health within the Department of Psychiatry, Melbourne Medical School, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He leads the MODE-BD (Multi-scale Oscillations, Dynamics & Emotion in Bipolar Disorder) team, based at the Department of Psychiatry and Northern Hospital. The team conceptualizes bipolar disorder as a dynamical disease characterized by systemic failure of temporal adaptation and fragility in homeostatic regulation, modeled as a 'broken thermostat' using Dynamical Systems Theory. Their research investigates how microscopic neuronal abnormalities, such as defects in calcium signaling, propagate to neural circuits and manifest as fluctuations in energy, sleep, emotion, and mood. Methods include longitudinal neuroimaging with high-field MRI and EEG, high-frequency monitoring of sleep, activity, and mood to identify dynamical markers like Critical Slowing Down preceding relapses, alongside clinical, circadian, and rodent studies. Houenou's broader academic interests encompass neuroimaging in psychiatry, focusing on bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and autism spectrum disorder using structural MRI.

Houenou earned his MD in Psychiatry and PhD at Université Paris Est Créteil, France, and was an alumni visiting scholar at the Douglas Mental Health Institute in Montréal, Canada. His career includes directing a neuroimaging lab in psychiatry at the ultra-high-field NeuroSpin platform from 2013 to 2025, serving as Psychiatrist at Hôpital Henri Mondor since 2005, and holding a Professor position at INSERM U955 Equipe 15 and CEA Saclay. At the University of Melbourne, he leads the Northern Hospital clinical hub. His contributions appear in over 240 publications, with more than 9,400 citations. Key works include 'Similar white matter but opposite grey matter changes in schizophrenia and high-functioning autism' (2016), 'A Multicenter Tractography Study of Deep White Matter Tracts in Bipolar I Disorder: Psychotic Features and Interhemispheric Disconnectivity' (2014), 'Biomarkers in bipolar disorder: a positional paper from the International Society for Bipolar Disorders Biomarkers Task Force' (2021), 'Psychotropic medications and their interactions with subcortical brain volume in bipolar disorder: An ENIGMA mega-analysis' (2026), and 'Decoding cortical folding with deep learning: toward neurodevelopmental biomarkers of psychiatric disorders' (2026). He delivered the keynote 'On the Edge: Dynamical Systems Models of Bipolar Disorder' at the Department of Psychiatry's 2025 End of Year Symposium and a special seminar at the Cognitive Neuroscience Hub.