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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)
Department:
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Leanne M. Williams, PhD, is the inaugural Vincent V.C. Woo Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health at 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.
For more than two decades, Dr. Williams has pioneered precision mental health, bringing the principles of precision medicine to psychiatry to improve outcomes beyond one-size-fits-all, trial-and-error care. Her research has shown that people with the same diagnosis can have different patterns of brain circuit dysfunction. These differences can help explain symptoms, identify biologically meaningful subtypes, and predict who is more likely to benefit from different treatments.
Her work began with standardized measures of brain function during emotion and cognition and grew into large prospective studies testing whether these measures could predict treatment outcomes. This research established reproducible brain circuits underlying depression and anxiety, identified circuit-based “biotypes” that capture clinically meaningful heterogeneity, and demonstrated that specific circuit patterns are associated with differential response to antidepressant medications, behavioral treatments, and neuromodulation.
Across this work, Dr. Williams has developed Precision Circuit Mapping (PCM), a framework that integrates more than two decades of research on brain circuit function, clinically meaningful heterogeneity, and differential treatment response to guide clinical decisions. PCM combines standardized measures of brain function at rest and during emotion and cognition to quantify circuit function in individual patients. Personalized Circuit Scores show how an individual’s circuit function compares with established reference ranges. PCM provides an organizing framework for integrating these circuit measures with clinical and other information to support personalized treatment through human-centered, explainable decision-making.
Dr. Williams and her collaborators have applied this framework across antidepressant medications, behavioral treatments, and neuromodulation, as well as mechanistically targeted repurposed treatments and emerging therapeutics including ketamine, MDMA-assisted therapy, and psilocybin. Her current research is testing these approaches prospectively, with the goal of getting more people to an effective treatment sooner.
Dr. Williams is Chair of the international Precision Mental Health Commission, convened with Stanford and Nature Mental Health, which brings together leaders across disciplines to define the evidence, standards, and implementation pathways needed to advance precision mental health into clinical use at scale.
To advance the clinical translation of this work, Dr. Williams co-founded Et Cere, which is developing PCM-based clinical decision support.
Dr. Williams has published more than 400 scientific papers and authored the first book on precision psychiatry. She previously founded and directed the Brain Dynamics Center at Sydney Medical School.
For more than two decades, Dr. Williams has pioneered precision mental health, bringing the principles of precision medicine to psychiatry to improve outcomes beyond one-size-fits-all, trial-and-error care. Her research has shown that people with the same diagnosis can have different patterns of brain circuit dysfunction. These differences can help explain symptoms, identify biologically meaningful subtypes, and predict who is more likely to benefit from different treatments.
Her work began with standardized measures of brain function during emotion and cognition and grew into large prospective studies testing whether these measures could predict treatment outcomes. This research established reproducible brain circuits underlying depression and anxiety, identified circuit-based “biotypes” that capture clinically meaningful heterogeneity, and demonstrated that specific circuit patterns are associated with differential response to antidepressant medications, behavioral treatments, and neuromodulation.
Across this work, Dr. Williams has developed Precision Circuit Mapping (PCM), a framework that integrates more than two decades of research on brain circuit function, clinically meaningful heterogeneity, and differential treatment response to guide clinical decisions. PCM combines standardized measures of brain function at rest and during emotion and cognition to quantify circuit function in individual patients. Personalized Circuit Scores show how an individual’s circuit function compares with established reference ranges. PCM provides an organizing framework for integrating these circuit measures with clinical and other information to support personalized treatment through human-centered, explainable decision-making.
Dr. Williams and her collaborators have applied this framework across antidepressant medications, behavioral treatments, and neuromodulation, as well as mechanistically targeted repurposed treatments and emerging therapeutics including ketamine, MDMA-assisted therapy, and psilocybin. Her current research is testing these approaches prospectively, with the goal of getting more people to an effective treatment sooner.
Dr. Williams is Chair of the international Precision Mental Health Commission, convened with Stanford and Nature Mental Health, which brings together leaders across disciplines to define the evidence, standards, and implementation pathways needed to advance precision mental health into clinical use at scale.
To advance the clinical translation of this work, Dr. Williams co-founded Et Cere, which is developing PCM-based clinical decision support.
Dr. Williams has published more than 400 scientific papers and authored the first book on precision psychiatry. She previously founded and directed the Brain Dynamics Center at Sydney Medical School.