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Leanne Williams
Vincent V.C. Woo Professor and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Major Laboratories and Clinical Translational Neurosciences Incubator)
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Leanne M. Williams, PhD, is the inaugural Vincent V.C. Woo Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She directs the PanLab for Personalized and Translational Neuroscience and serves as Associate Chair of Translational Neuroscience within Stanford Psychiatry. She also holds a joint appointment as Director of the Precision Medicine Core at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System MIRECC.
Dr. Williams is leading a transformation in psychiatry through the development and clinical translation of a brain circuit–based platform for patient stratification. Her work addresses a central challenge in mental health care: substantial biological heterogeneity within diagnostic categories that contributes to prolonged trial-and-error treatment. Over the past 25 years, she has established and validated a taxonomy of brain-circuit 'biotypes' for depression, anxiety, attentional, and related disorders.
Her team has developed standardized neuroimaging and behavioral paradigms that quantify circuit function at the individual level, enabling prospective matching of patients to pharmacologic, neuromodulatory, behavioral, and emerging rapid-acting therapeutics, including psychedelic-assisted treatments. Across multi-site studies, this stratification approach has been shown to identify subgroups with substantially higher remission rates when treatments are aligned to circuit profiles, demonstrating the capacity to double treatment success compared to non-stratified care.
Dr. Williams has published over 400 scientific papers and authored the first book on Precision Psychiatry. She previously founded and directed the Brain Dynamics Center at Sydney Medical School.
Dr. Williams is leading a transformation in psychiatry through the development and clinical translation of a brain circuit–based platform for patient stratification. Her work addresses a central challenge in mental health care: substantial biological heterogeneity within diagnostic categories that contributes to prolonged trial-and-error treatment. Over the past 25 years, she has established and validated a taxonomy of brain-circuit 'biotypes' for depression, anxiety, attentional, and related disorders.
Her team has developed standardized neuroimaging and behavioral paradigms that quantify circuit function at the individual level, enabling prospective matching of patients to pharmacologic, neuromodulatory, behavioral, and emerging rapid-acting therapeutics, including psychedelic-assisted treatments. Across multi-site studies, this stratification approach has been shown to identify subgroups with substantially higher remission rates when treatments are aligned to circuit profiles, demonstrating the capacity to double treatment success compared to non-stratified care.
Dr. Williams has published over 400 scientific papers and authored the first book on Precision Psychiatry. She previously founded and directed the Brain Dynamics Center at Sydney Medical School.
