Giovanni Andrea Fava got his medical degree from the University of Padova in 1977, with electives at McMaster University, Rochester, NY (Engel) and Dartmouth (Lipowski). In Padova he also completed his residency training in psychiatry in 1981. After working for several years in the US (Albuquerque and Buffalo, N.Y.), he came back to Italy in 1988, where he established an Affective Disorders Program in the Department of Psychology of the University of Bologna. He was first Associate Professor of Psychosomatic Medicine and then Professor of Clinical Psychology there until the end of 2018.

He is currently Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has authored more than 600 scientific papers and performed groundbreaking research in several fields. He has introduced a novel psychotherapeutic approach for modulating psychological well-being (Well-Being Therapy, which he has manualized in his book “Well-Being Therapy. Treatment manual and clinical applications” published by Karger in 2016), the sequential model for combining pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy, the concept of staging in psychiatry, a new method of classification of psychosomatic distress (the Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research), the concept of oppositional tolerance with antidepressant treatment and the clinimetric approach to psychiatric evaluation. His latest book is entitled “Discontinuing antidepressant medications”, published by Oxford University Press in 2021.

For 30 years (1992-2022) he has been Editor-in-Chief of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, a top journal in psychiatry and psychology. Under his editorship, the journal reached the outstanding impact factor of 25.617 in 2022 and was placed second in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) Psychology ranking and fourth in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) Psychiatry ranking.

His current h-index is in the upper seventies, with more than 30,000 citations. He is included in the Clarivate list of the most influential scientists of the world in psychiatry and psychology.