NEW YORK, 5 May 2026 — Genomic Press today launches Brain Health, a new peer-reviewed medical research journal dedicated to the science of lifelong brain resilience. The inaugural issue is freely accessible at https://bh.genomicpress.com.
The journal is edited by Dr. Ma-Li Wong, a neuroscientist with a long record of work at the interface of molecular neuroscience and clinical psychiatry. In her opening editorial, "The astrocyte and the plastic spoon: Welcoming Brain Health, a journal of lifelong brain resilience" (https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026d.0009), Wong frames the journal as the meeting place for several fields that have long worked in parallel without convening.
"Cognitive reserve has been sitting in one room. Sleep has been sitting in another. The biology of brain aging has been sitting in a third, and nutritional psychiatry in a fourth, and the social and behavioral sciences down the hall in a building that the molecular people rarely visit," Wong writes. "The continuum that connects all of them is the same brain, changing across a life. That continuum is the territory of this journal."
The inaugural issue is anchored by a Genomic Press Interview with Dr. Luísa Pinto of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, titled "Luísa Pinto: rethinking depression through the lens of neuron-glia plasticity" ( https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026k.0003 ). Pinto's research has reshaped how the field thinks about recovery from depression. Two decades ago, when the dominant view of the brain ran through neurons and stopped there, Pinto chose to study the cells nobody was studying: the newborn astrocytes that arrive late in adult life and weave themselves into circuits already in motion. The literature was thin. The methods were unsteady. She has since shown that without these cells, depression does not lift for long, and with them, recovery holds.
"We open this journal with Pinto, and not by accident," Wong notes in her editorial. "Hers is the kind of patient, twenty-year work that the field has not always rewarded but that turns out, in retrospect, to have been load-bearing. The neuron-only story we told ourselves was incomplete."
Alongside the Pinto interview, the inaugural issue carries a Viewpoint by Dr. Gonçalo Cotovio and Dr. Albino J. Oliveira-Maia of the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, titled "From lesions to brain health: causal circuits in psychiatry" (https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026v.0012). The piece argues that brain health is more than the absence of disease. It is the capacity of distributed networks to sustain adaptive regulation of emotion, cognition, and behavior. Cotovio and Oliveira-Maia trace the evolution of the field from classical lesion mapping to causal network mapping, drawing on lesions, deep brain stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and connectomics to identify circuits whose disruption or modulation produces or relieves psychiatric symptoms across depression, mania, psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
"The Cotovio and Oliveira-Maia Viewpoint is the methodological argument of this launch," Wong writes. "It is what the science of brain health looks like when the unit of analysis becomes the circuit rather than the diagnosis. We expect this framework to do significant work in the years ahead."
Wong's editorial also gestures toward the journal's already accumulating pipeline of topical work. The same inaugural issue carries a Perspective on the human microplastic burden and brain health, and a scientific obituary marking the death of J. Craig Venter on 29 April 2026, both of which are the subjects of separate announcements today. Their presence at the launch, Wong writes, is evidence that the conversations the journal hopes to convene are already arriving on schedule.
The journal's scope, as outlined in the editorial, is deliberately broad and it includes healthspan longevity as the pinnacle of brain health. Brain Health publishes molecular and cellular neuroscience, neuroimaging, electrophysiology, computational modeling, clinical trials, epidemiology, digital health, and behavioral intervention science. It publishes psychology in its full reach, from the affective and cognitive sciences to positive psychology. It publishes normative data, the patient and unglamorous work of mapping what brains actually look like across age, sex, geography, and life history. It publishes the social sciences and the humanities, because, as Wong puts it, a science of brain health that ignores narrative, language, music, ritual, grief, and love would be studying an organ that does not exist.
"We are conscious that the field this journal hopes to convene does not yet fully exist," Wong writes in closing. "There is no department of brain health at any university we know of. There is no medical specialty that trains for it. The patient who walks into all of those clinicians' offices is the same patient. The brain they are each touching is the same brain. We launch this journal in the hope of accelerating the moment when the field catches up to the patient."
Brain Health operates alongside its sibling journal Brain Medicine, also published by Genomic Press. Where Brain Medicine spans the full landscape of brain disorders from origins to treatment, Brain Health foregrounds the science of sustaining and optimizing brain function across the lifespan. The two journals are designed as complements rather than competitors.
The inaugural issue of Brain Health is freely accessible at https://bh.genomicpress.com.
About Brain Health
Brain Health is a high-quality, peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York, dedicated to the science of lifelong brain resilience and longevity. Editor-in-Chief: Ma-Li Wong. The journal's scope spans molecular and cellular neuroscience, neuroimaging, electrophysiology, computational modeling, clinical trials, epidemiology, digital health, behavioral intervention science, psychology, normative data, and the social sciences and humanities.
About Genomic Press
Genomic Press is an independent academic publisher founded in 2023 and based in New York. Its journals include Brain Medicine, Genomic Psychiatry, Brain Health, and Psychedelics. Genomic Press also operates the trade imprint Allele Books.
Visit the Genomic Press Virtual Library: https://issues.genomicpress.com/bookcase/gtvov/
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Genomic Press website: https://genomicpress.com/
Brain Health website: https://bh.genomicpress.com/
Interview with Luísa Pinto: https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026k.0003
Viewpoint by Drs. Gonçalo Cotovio and Albino J. Oliveira-Maia: https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026v.0012
