Robert van Voren is Chief Executive of Human Rights in Mental Health - Federation Global Initiative on Psychiatry (FGIP) and a Sovietologist by education. He is currently Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, and the Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and Executive Director of the Andrei Sakharov Research Center for Democratic Development in Lithuania.

Van Voren is board member of several organizations in the field of human rights and mental health. Van Voren has written extensively on Soviet issues and, in particular, issues related to mental health and human rights, and published a dozen books. His most recent ones are On Dissidents and Madness (2009), Cold War in Psychiatry (2010) and Undigested Past – the Holocaust in Lithuania (2011).