Giovanni Andrea Fava is the President of the Academy of Well-Being Therapy and the father of Well-Being Therapy (WBT). He treated his first case in 1994 and began research that would culminate in his first publication on WBT in 1998. He fully manualized WBT in 2016 writing the book: Well-being Therapy. Treatment Manual and Clinical Applications (Karger).

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 500 scientific papers and performed groundbreaking research in several fields. He has introduced a novel psychotherapeutic approach – which has been manualized – for increasing psychological well-being (Well-Being Therapy), 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.

Since 1992, he is Editor-in-Chief of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, a journal published by Karger that, with its current impact factor of 17.659. His current h index is in the sixties, with more than 12,000 citations.