Ali Saffet Gönül completed his primary and secondary education at TED Ankara College and his high school education at İzmir Bornova Anatolian High School. He received his medical education at Hacettepe Faculty of Medicine. During his medical training he briefly worked at the NHS Hospital Nephrology Unit in Sheffield, England. He completed his psychiatry residency at Erciyes University Department of Psychiatry. During his residency, he worked with Dr. Şahap Erkoç at Bakırköy Psychiatric and Neurological Diseases Hospital and Prof. Canan Başar Eroğlu at the University of Bremen in Germany for brief training periods. He joined the Ege University Faculty of Medicine Department of Psychiatry in 2002, where he continued to work in neuroimaging. He became an associate professor in 2004 and within the same year he received training on structural and functional neuroimaging at the Institute of Physics and Biology at the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, with the Charcot Scholarship from the French Government. He worked as a post-doc researcher for one year at Stony Brook University Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Clinic and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States. In May 2007, he was appointed as an associate professor of clinical psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Mercer University in Georgia, and became a professor in the same department in 2014. Having received 3 poster awards at the European Neuropsychopharmacology Congresses, Dr. Gönül also won the “fellowship” award from the college that organized these congresses in 2003. In the same year, he received the international travel support given by the Society of Biological Psychiatry in the USA. After receiving the “fellowship” award of the New York Academy of Sciences in 2007, Dr. Gönül, established the SoCAT (Standardization of Computational Anatomy Techniques for Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences) neuroimaging laboratory under the Department of Psychiatry at Ege University Faculty of Medicine in 2009. He was appointed as a professor in January 2011. In 2014, he became a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Mercer University. Between 2016-2017, he served as the director of Ege University Addiction, Toxicology and Drug Research Institute. In 2018, he served as the vice rector of Ege University. He is still continuing his work at Ege University in Turkey and Mercer University in the USA. He has more than one hundred research articles in international indexes and posters presented in international congresses. He is a member of the editorial board for the Journal Affective Disorders. In addition to being one of the researchers of the the international research community ENIGMA Consortium, he is also an editor/reviewer in many national and international journals.
