Leanne Williams

About

Leanne M. Williams, PhD, is the Vincent V.C. Woo Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health. She directs the PanLab for Personalized and Translational Neuroscience and serves as Associate Chair of Translational Neuroscience within Stanford Psychiatry. Additionally, she holds a joint appointment as Director of the Precision Medicine Core at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System MIRECC. Her work focuses on transforming psychiatry through the development and clinical translation of a brain circuit–based platform for patient stratification, addressing the 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, utilizing standardized neuroimaging and behavioral paradigms to quantify circuit function at the individual level. Her team’s stratification approach has demonstrated the capacity to identify subgroups with significantly higher remission rates when treatments are aligned to circuit profiles, effectively doubling treatment success compared to non-stratified care. Dr. Williams has published over 400 scientific papers and authored the first book on Precision Psychiatry. Her research aims to accelerate the translation of neuroscience insights into…

Research topics

• Psychiatry
• Psychology
• Medicine
• Clinical psychology
• Neuroscience
• Engineering
• Pathology
• Virology
• Biology
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

  Biological Psychiatry · 2021 · 240 citations

  DOI

• The impact of COVID-19 on mental health: The interactive roles of brain biotypes and human connection

  Brain Behavior & Immunity - Health · 2020 · 125 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  COVID-19 along with the mitigation strategies being used to address the virus pose significant threats to our individual and collective mental health. As the crisis evolves and persists, it will be increasingly important for the research community to conduct investigations that address the mental health consequences of COVID-19. The causes of mental health effects in the context of COVID-19 are multifactorial and likely include biological, behavioral, and environmental determinants. We argue tha…

  DOI

• The human connectome project for disordered emotional states: Protocol and rationale for a research domain criteria study of brain connectivity in young adult anxiety and depression

  NeuroImage · 2020 · 52 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Through the Human Connectome Project (HCP) our understanding of the functional connectome of the healthy brain has been dramatically accelerated. Given the pressing public health need, we must increase our understanding of how connectome dysfunctions give rise to disordered mental states. Mental disorders arising from high levels of negative emotion or from the loss of positive emotional experience affect over 400 million people globally. Such states of disordered emotion cut across multiple dia…

  DOI

• Conserved brain-wide emergence of emotional response from sensory experience in humans and mice

  Science · 2025-05-29 · 18 citations

  articleOpen access

  Emotional responses to sensory experience are central to the human condition in health and disease. We hypothesized that principles governing the emergence of emotion from sensation might be discoverable through their conservation across the mammalian lineage. We therefore designed a cross-species neural activity screen, applicable to humans and mice, combining precise affective behavioral measurements, clinical medication administration, and brain-wide intracranial electrophysiology. This scree…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Personalized models of Beam/F3 targeting in transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression: Implications for precision clinical translation

  Brain stimulation · 2025-04-07 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  <h2>Abstract</h2><h3>Background</h3> Clinical transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for depression routinely relies on the scalp-based Beam/F3 targeting method to identify stimulation targets in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dLPFC). Scalp-based targeting offers a low-cost and easily implemented method for TMS coil placement, enhancing treatment availability. However, limited anatomical and functional specificity of the Beam/F3 method may affect treatment outcomes, motivating assessment o…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Engaging self-regulation targets to understand the mechanisms of behavior change and improve mood and weight outcomes

  NIH · $2.6M · 2015–2021

• Engaging self-regulation targets to understand the mechanisms of behavior change and improve mood and weight outcomes

  NIH · $2.6M · 2015–2018

• Mapping connectomes for disordered emotional states

  NIH · $3.1M · 2017–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Evian Gordon

  Brain Resource Center

  694 shared

• Anthony Harris

  Westmead Institute for Medical Research

  463 shared

• Mayuresh S. Korgaonkar

  University of Sydney

  447 shared

• Justine M. Gatt

  388 shared

• Stuart M. Grieve

  University of Sydney

  309 shared

• Peter R. Schofield

  Neuroscience Research Australia

  289 shared

• Richard A. Bryant

  UNSW Sydney

  235 shared

• Michael Kohn

  Westmead Institute for Medical Research

  223 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Stanford University School of Medicine

• M.D.

  Sydney Medical School

Awards & honors

• The Gold Medal Award, Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP…
• The Perry Award (In memory of Samuel Wesley Perry III, MD),…
• Educator Award, Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) (202…
• Chairman’s Senior Faculty Mentor Award, Stanford School of M…
• George Thompson Award to the Women’s Leadership Group of SOB…

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Jordan Gerard Starckh-230
• Carol Dweckh-122
• Hazel Markush-104