Hannes Meilicke

Physician & Psychiatric Researcher

Hannes Meilicke

Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry and Psychology, XXXPreviously Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Childhood adversity, stress responsivity, depression and translational neuroscience.

Get in touch Publications Download CV
Scholar ORCID ResearchGate LinkedIn Message
Scroll

About me

Physician and psychiatric researcher. I study how childhood adversity shapes the way the brain and the body answer stress — with neuroimaging, magnetic resonance spectroscopy and machine learning.

MD thesis at Friedrich Schiller University Jena with Dr Lejla Colic and Prof Dr Martin Walter. Approbation — the full German licence to practise medicine — in 2025.

Hannes Meilicke at work

In the clinic

The measurements are worth taking because of what happens in the room. Psychiatry is the one part of medicine where the instrument is the conversation.

  • Clinical psychiatryThe work of sitting with someone long enough to understand what is actually happening to them, and of being useful while the picture is still unclear.
  • PsychotherapyWhere the evidence and the encounter meet. I want to be as careful with the hour as I am with the data.
  • Time with patientsThe part I would not trade. Everything else — the imaging, the models, the papers — is downstream of it.

Away from the desk

  • Football soccer

  • Exercising

  • Language learning

  • Reading

The books that mattered most, year by year

My Intellectual heroes

Grouped by the questions they opened, not by discipline. They taught me how to think, not what to think — and several of them contradict each other flatly.

Psychiatry and the human condition 12
  • Otto KernbergPsychoanalystfounder of transference-focused psychotherapy

    What I learned — to be written.

  • C. G. JungPsychiatristfounder of analytical psychology

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Daniel KahnemanPsychologistauthor of Thinking, Fast and Slow

    The first psychologist who really held me, and the book came to me rather than the other way round: I won Thinking, Fast and Slow at eighteen, my school’s prize for economics.

    I read it and knew at once that there was real scholarly work in front of me. Quietly, over years, it set my assumptions about human nature, about how far rationality actually reaches, and about how economic agents behave once you aggregate them into a market. Some of the studies it cites have since failed to replicate, and that criticism is fair and worth taking seriously — but the foundation held. Most of what I now think about judgement under uncertainty still rests on it.

  • Antonio DamasioNeuroscientistauthor of Descartes’ Error

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Edward BullmorePsychiatrist & neuroscientistauthor of The Divided Mind and The Inflamed Mind

    Cartesian dualism never convinced me, but nobody had shown me what the alternative looked like in practice. He did.

    The Divided Mind was the first umbrella I had seen wide enough to hold the whole problem: fractal brain networks, genome-wide atlases and polygenic risk scores, gene expression mapped onto the networks themselves, epigenetics, developmental trajectories through synaptic pruning with adolescence as the window where it goes wrong, and the immune system inside the brain down to the microglia. Separately I had read all of it. From him I read it as one account of how a disorder like schizophrenia might actually come about — and it was the first time biological psychiatry felt coherent to me rather than assembled out of parts. The Inflamed Mind does it again for depression, and so do his lectures. I have not read anyone who joins the fields better.

    VideoBullmore on The Divided MindWatch
  • Randolph NesseEvolutionary psychiatristauthor of Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Lisa Feldman BarrettPsychologist & neuroscientistthe theory of constructed emotion

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Eric KandelNeuroscientistNobel laureate for the biology of memory

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiPsychologistauthor of Flow

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Hartmut RosaSociologistauthor of Resonance

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Bent FlyvbjergSocial scientistphronesis, and why big projects fail

    What I learned — to be written.

Philosophy, literature and strategy 10
  • Sun TzuStrategistauthor of The Art of War

    What I learned — to be written.

  • ConfuciusPhilosopherthe Analects

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Karl PopperPhilosopher of sciencefalsification

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Roger ScrutonPhilosopheraesthetics and conservative thought

    What I learned — to be written.

  • René GirardLiterary theoristmimetic desire — we want by imitation

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Hannah ArendtPolitical theoristauthor of The Origins of Totalitarianism

    What I learned — to be written.

  • John GrayPhilosopherauthor of Straw Dogs

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Nassim Nicholas TalebEssayist, probability theorist & practitionerauthor of The Black Swan

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Hermann HesseNovelistauthor of The Glass Bead Game

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Lev TolstoyNovelistauthor of War and Peace

    What I learned — to be written.

Society, economics and politics 6
  • Noam ChomskyLinguist & political criticauthor of Manufacturing Consent

    What I learned — to be written.

  • David GraeberAnthropologistauthor of Debt: The First 5,000 Years

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Friedrich August von HayekEconomistauthor of The Road to Serfdom

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Branko MilanovićEconomistglobal inequality and the elephant curve

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Yanis VaroufakisEconomistformer finance minister of Greece

    What I learned — to be written.

  • Lee Kuan YewStatesmanfounding prime minister of Singapore

    What I learned — to be written.

Writing & Media

Essays, opinion pieces, talks and video on psychiatry, medicine and adjacent questions.

Reading notes

2018 – 2025, kept up

The books that mattered most, year by year

Eight years of reading, counted down from the honorable mentions to number one, with what each one changed. Starts at 2025 and runs back to a childhood in Heilbronn.

Read
Video

2026

Edward Bullmore on The Divided Mind

The book that first showed me what a biological explanation of psychiatric illness could look like, and the argument that the split between brain and mind has done real harm.

Watch
Essay

Coming soon

Headline of the first essay

Two or three lines of preview: enough to say what the piece is about and why it is worth the reader’s time.

Read
Essay

Coming soon

Headline of the second essay

A second long piece: the question it starts from, the turn in the middle and where it leaves the reader.

Read
Opinion

Coming soon

An opinion piece, in eight hundred words

A short argument about clinical practice, research culture or the way psychiatry talks about itself.

Read
Opinion

Coming soon

A second opinion, in a thousand words

One claim, the evidence behind it, and what it would change on a normal working day.

Read
Video

Coming soon

A short talk on stress and the brain

Conference talk, interview or explainer. The block links straight to the recording.

Watch

Research & Publications

One question runs through all of it: why the same hardship leaves one person ill and another well. I work at the join between psychiatry and neuroscience, following that question from the acute stress response through the long course of depression, and I care most about findings that survive contact with a second sample.

01

Childhood adversity & the stress response

What early adversity leaves behind in the way body and brain answer an acute psychosocial stressor — cortisol, network dynamics, and what separates the people who recover quickly from those who do not.

02

The course of depression

Why an episode lifts, lingers or returns. Chronicity, remission and relapse traced through large longitudinal cohorts rather than a single time point.

03

Imaging, metabolites & computation

The methods that make the first two questions answerable: fMRI and MR spectroscopy alongside physiological signals, read with machine learning and judged by whether the result generalises.

Publications

Peer-reviewed articles2
  1. 2026

    Brain activity during a psychosocial stress task: effects of neurometabolites, cortisol, childhood adversity and recent chronic stress.

    Meilicke, H.M.X.*, Golbabaei, S.* et al.

    Neuroscience Applied 5, 106212 · *equal contribution

    DOI

  2. 2024

    Association among retinal health, self-reported depressive symptoms, and demographic, lifestyle and health markers: the META-KLS cohort analysis.

    Meilicke, H.M.X. et al.

    Biomarkers in Neuropsychiatry 10, 100094

    DOI

Conference contributions6
  1. 2026

    Childhood adversity and the longitudinal relationship with depressive symptomatology: chronicity, remission, and relapse in the Health and Retirement Study.

    Meilicke, H.M.X., Estévez Martinez, L., Fatima, H.

    26th WPA World Congress of Psychiatry, Stockholm · e-poster presentation

  2. 2026

    Theta tACS for cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease: a meta-analysis.

    Shing, Y.K., Gamaleldin, F., Meilicke, H.M.X. et al.

    Neuroscience Clinical Applications (NCSA) 2026 · poster presentation

  3. 2024

    Interaction among heart rate variability, neurometabolites and childhood maltreatment during a social stress imaging task.

    Golbabaei, S., … Meilicke, H.M.X. et al.

    Biological Psychiatry 95(10), S121

    DOI

  4. 2023

    Effects of childhood adversity on the relationship among resting state network dynamics, cortisol and subjective status after an acute psychosocial stressor.

    Chand, T., Bertram, L., Meilicke, H.M.X. et al.

    Biological Psychiatry 93(9), S274–S275

    DOI

  5. 2023

    Childhood adversity interacts with the relationship among brain network dynamics, cortisol and subjective status after an acute psychosocial stressor.

    Chand, T., Bertram, L., Meilicke, H.M.X. et al.

    Clinical Neurophysiology 148, e66–e67 · P-129

    DOI

  6. 2022

    Der Einfluss von Kindheitstraumatisierung auf psychosozialen Stress bei gesunden Erwachsenen: eine fMRT-Studie.

    Meilicke, H.M.X. et al.

    DGPPN Congress · poster presentation

See all publications on Google Scholar

Curriculum Vitae

Since 2026

Research fellowship, XXX 🇺🇸

Department of Psychiatry and Psychology.

US clinical experience 🇺🇸

  • Child psychiatryUniversity of XXX
  • PsychiatryUniversity of XXX
Since 2021

Doctorate in medicine (Dr. med.) 🇩🇪

Friedrich Schiller University Jena.
Advisors: Dr Lejla Colic and Prof Dr Martin Walter.
Thesis: “placeholder”

Approbation — full licence to practise medicine

Granted in 2025.

  • 2026USMLE Step 1 – passedUnited States Medical Licensing Examination
2016 – 2025

Medical studies

  • Nov 2023 – Oct 2024Clinical rotations
    • Psychiatry · Psychiatric University Hospital, Zurich 🇨🇭
    • Internal medicine · Pontificia Universidad Católica, Santiago 🇨🇱
    • General surgery · Universidad de la República, Montevideo 🇺🇾
  • 2020 – 2021Università degli Studi di Padova 🇮🇹ERASMUS+ exchange · two semesters abroad
    • Evolutionary biology, affective neuroscience and cognitive psychology
    • Elective · neurology · University Clinic Padova 🇮🇹
  • 2018 – 2025Friedrich Schiller University Jena 🇩🇪Clinical years (Klinik) · research track
    second and third state examinations (M2, M3)
    • Electives
    • Internal medicine & psychotherapy · Adler Kliniken, Beijing 🇨🇳
    • Family medicine · Klinikum am Weissenhof 🇩🇪
    • Cardiology · Klinikum am Plattenwald 🇩🇪
  • 2016 – 2018Goethe University Frankfurt 🇩🇪Preclinical years (Vorklinik)
    first state examination (M1, the “Physikum”)
2015 – 2016

Chinese language and culture 🇨🇳

Shanghai International Studies University (上海外国语大学).

The Pudong skyline across the Huangpu at night On the Great Wall With classmates in the old town The main gate of Shanghai International Studies University A Lego figure on the Bund, the Pudong skyline behind it
2012 – 2015

Abitur, German school-leaving examination 🇩🇪

Gustav von Schmoller Schule, Heilbronn.

The Abitur year group photographed outside the school Crossing the stage with the Abitur certificate Playing the piano on stage
Growing up

Heilbronn, Germany 🇩🇪

Football with my friends until it got dark, piano at home, and long evenings with Pokémon Ruby and The Legend of Zelda.

At home in Heilbronn On a motorbike as a boy A birthday table with friends Playing indoors with friends The elementary school class

Download CV (PDF)

Message

Questions and collaborations are welcome.