Armin von Gunten

Principal Investigator

In SWISS100, I am most interested in life-long determinants of psychopathology in the very old.

Current Positions

  • Chief of Service of the old-age psychiatry service (SUPAA), Department of psychiatry (DP), Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV)
  • Full Professor of geriatric psychiatry and psychotherapy at UNIL
  • Vice-President of the Swiss Society for Old Age Psychiatry
  • Vice-president of the European Association for Geriatric Psychiatry

Educational Background

  • FMH/ ISFM specialty in psychiatry and psychotherapy
  • FMH / ISFM subspecialty in old age psychiatry and psychotherapy
  • FMH / ISFM subspecialty in consultation and liaison psychiatry
  • FMH / ISFM certificate in interventional psychiatry

Prior Experience

  • Clinical training in psychiatry and psychotherapy in French-speaking Switzerland and neurology at the Universidade Federal do Ceará in Brazil
  • Post-doctoral clinical and research fellowships in neuropsychiatry at the University College London (UCL), Institute of Neurology, UK
  • Post-doctoral research fellowship in Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, USA
  • Visiting professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil

Research focus

  • Predictors of behavioral and psychological symptoms and signs in the elderly with cognitive disorders and further cognitive decline
  • Various methodologies derived from psychopathology, mathematics, neuropsychology, epidemiology, genetics, metabolics, and neuroimaging as well as animal models

Additional Experiences/Mile Stones

  • Former Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Old-Age Psychiatry
  • Chair of the Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms in Neurocognitive Disorders and of the Old-Age Perspective Working Groups of the ICD-11 task force of the WHO
  • Founding Member of the Swiss Society for Interventional Psychiatry