Leanne Williams, PhD, is the inaugural Vincent V.C. Woo Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Associate Chair of Translational Neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is the founding director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness and of the Stanford PanLab for Precision Psychiatry and Translational Neuroscience. She holds a joint appointment as Director of the Precision Medicine Core at the Palo Alto VA Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center.
Prior to joining the Stanford community, Dr. Williams was the Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and Director of the Brain Dynamics Center at Sydney Medical School.
Her PhD was completed with a British Council Scholarship for study at Oxford University.
She has developed a precision neuroscience approach for application in psychiatry. This approach is grounded in a taxonomy of biotypes for depression and anxiety and a new image processing system to quantify these biotypes. Her research uses biotypes for more individualized diagnosis and for personalizing and tailoring the treatment. She evaluates pharmacotherapies, behavioral interventions, novel selective medicines, neuromodulation, and exploratory therapeutics. To tie together findings across studies, she integrates common neuroimaging, behavioral, and clinical measures. Computational approaches are used to further refine and expand her approach to precision mental health. Dr. Williams' research programs are supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health. She has published the first book on Precision Psychiatry and contributed over 360 scientific papers to the field.