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, www.well-being-therapy.com , which he has manualized in the book “Well-Being Therapy” 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 “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 journal published by Karger that, with its current impact factor of 25.62, ranks second among the SCI psychology journals (but it is the first of those publishing original research), and fourth in the psychiatry ranking. He is now Honorary Editor of the journal. His current h index is in the seventies, with more than 20,000 citations.