Personalized and Translational Neuroscience Lab (PanLab)
Principal Investigator
Principal Investigator
Vincent V.C. Woo Professor
Associate Chair of Translational Neuroscience
Stanford University School of Medicine
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Director, Education & Precision Medicine Core
VA Palo Alto Sierra-Pacific MIRECC
Leanne Williams, Ph.D., is the Vincent V.C. Woo Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences 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 Personalized and Translational Neuroscience, Associate Chair of Translational Neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and Director of Education and 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 founding chair of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and directed the Brain Dynamics Center at Sydney Medical School. Her PhD was completed with a British Council Scholarship for study at Oxford University.
Dr. Williams' Center and translational programs integrate advanced neuroimaging, technology and digital innovation to transform the way we detect mental disorders, tailor interventions and promote wellness. She has developed the first taxonomy for depression and anxiety that quantifies brain circuits for diagnostic precision and prediction. Dr. Williams' research programs are supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, spanning priority Research Domain Criteria, Human Connectome and Science of Behavior Change initiatives. She has contributed over 390 scientific papers to the field.
Early Career Award Mentees
Early Career Award Mentees
Primary Mentorship
Primary Mentorship
Assistant Professor,
Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences
Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences
Laura Hack, M.D., Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor within the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford School of Medicine and a Staff Physician within the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She also holds the positions of Director of Novel & Precision Neurotherapeutics at the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness (PMHW), Director of the Stanford Translational Precision Mental Health Clinic, and Deputy Director and Esketamine Lead at the Precision Neuromodulation Clinic (PNC), VA Palo Alto Health Care System
She received her B.S. in Neuroscience from the College of William and Mary and her M.D. and Ph.D. in Human and Molecular Genetics from Virginia Commonwealth University. Subsequently, she completed a Psychiatry Residency at Emory, where she was Chief of the Research Track.
Dr. Hack then completed a Fellowship through the Palo Alto VA MIRECC and Stanford under the mentorship of Drs. Williams, Schatzberg, and O'Hara. As an early career faculty member, Dr. Hack's translational research program focuses on identifying bioclinical subtypes of depression and testing mechanistically-guided treatments for these subtypes. Clinically, Dr. Hack specializes in delivering novel treatments to patients suffering from treatment resistant depression and related disorders.In her free time, she enjoys travel, vegetarian cooking, attending her husband's performances with robotic musicians, and spending time with her family, friends, and polydactyl cat.
Dr. Hack then completed a Fellowship through the Palo Alto VA MIRECC and Stanford under the mentorship of Drs. Williams, Schatzberg, and O'Hara. As an early career faculty member, Dr. Hack's translational research program focuses on identifying bioclinical subtypes of depression and testing mechanistically-guided treatments for these subtypes. Clinically, Dr. Hack specializes in delivering novel treatments to patients suffering from treatment resistant depression and related disorders.In her free time, she enjoys travel, vegetarian cooking, attending her husband's performances with robotic musicians, and spending time with her family, friends, and polydactyl cat.
John Leikauf, M.D., is a graduate of the Stanford Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship, Research Track. Previously, he served as Chief Resident of the General Psychiatry residency at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he also attended medical school. His clinical interests are many and include working with young people with disruptive behaviors, ADHD, anxiety disorders, and family conflict. His research interests are complimentary and he has been working with Prof. Leanne Williams in developing personalized approaches to treatment of ADHD and anxiety by understanding the relationships between measures of impulsivity, inattention, and arousal across different levels of organization. Some of this work has benefitted from collaboration and the incredible expertise in statistics and computer science here at Stanford, and he is currently working on a project involving the Apple Watch for deep phenotyping via passive data collection. He has greatly enjoyed his time at Stanford so far and is excited to be joining the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Division as a junior faculty member. In his personal life, he enjoys spending relaxing time with family and friends, yoga, and exploring the natural beauty of the Bay Area on foot.
Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist
and Clinical Assistant Professor,
Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences
and Clinical Assistant Professor,
Psychiatry and Behavioral
Sciences
Co-Mentorship
Co-Mentorship
Instructor (Affiliate), Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Donna Murray, Ph.D., is a behavioral neuroscientist. She is a Research Health Science Specialist at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs HCS and Instructor (Affiliate) at Stanford School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Murray's research focuses on the neurobiology of substance use disorders and the impact of psychiatric comorbidities. Her research uses multimodal neuroimaging methods (MR spectroscopy and resting-state fMRI), neuropsychological assessment measures, and statistical learning methods.
Donna is a collaborator with the Padula BRAVE lab.
PanLab Post-Docs
PanLab Post-Docs
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jeesung earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she focused on enhancing the effectiveness of behavioral health interventions and understanding why certain individuals are more vulnerable to mental health challenges, particularly in relation to loneliness and social isolation.
Passionate about translating scientific discoveries into real-world solutions, Jeesung’s work at PanLab leverages brain function as a biomarker to improve the precision of depression treatments and develop personalized mental health care models. Her approach integrates diverse methods, including neuroimaging, social network analysis, experience sampling, wearable data analysis, surveys, and behavioral assessments.
Outside the lab, Jeesung enjoys unwinding with dog videos, taking walks while listening to music and podcasts, and immersing herself in mystery novels.
MIRECC Advanced Fellow
Stanford Clinical Scholar
Teddy earned his M.D. from the American University of Beirut and completed his Psychiatry Residency at both Stanford University and Cleveland Clinic, where he received the NIMH Outstanding Resident Award. He underwent postdoctoral training at Yale's Department of Psychiatry, specializing in multimodal neuroimaging, network neuroscience, and clinical trials of rapid-acting antidepressants like ketamine.
His current research focuses on understanding the neural underpinnings of trauma and chronic stress disorders, identifying brain-based biomarkers for precision psychiatry, and developing therapies for treatment-resistant depression and PTSD — namely, glutamatergic antidepressants, psychedelics, and neuromodulation.
T32 Fellow
Clinical Scholar
Cordelia Erickson-Davis, M.D., Ph.D., is an interdisciplinary physician-scientist in training. She has spent the past two decades studying the neurosciences and the social sciences, in one form or another, as a way of exploring the relationship between perceiver and environment. She utilizes anthropological and neuroscientific methods to bring together physiological, phenomenological, and sociocultural data to create more holistic descriptions of perceptual experience.
She received a BA in neuroscience from Mount Holyoke College, an MPH in the history and ethics of public health from Columbia University, and an MD and PhD from Stanford, the latter in socio-cultural anthropology. She is currently finishing up her residency training in psychiatry at Stanford.
She is delighted to be joining the Williams PanLab for her postdoc, with co-mentorship by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. She will be focused on integrating phenomenological and other ethnographic data with behavioral and neuroimaging data in mechanistic studies of psychedelics. She is particularly interested in questions of dissociation and the forms of connection that dissociative states of consciousness can facilitate, which often go overlooked in both psychiatric and anthropological scholarly work.
Xue received her PhD degree in 2019 in Biomedical Engineering from Tsinghua University School of Medicine. She was a Visiting Student Researcher in the Radiology Department at Stanford in 2017-2018. Her PhD research involved methods development for dynamic fMRI and concurrent fPET-fMRI and its application in identifying neuroimaging markers for depression vulnerability. As a postdoctoral neuroimaging engineer-scientist in the PanLab, Xue’s research interest lies at the intersection of neuroimaging and computation, and their translation in addressing clinical questions in psychiatry. Currently, Xue is interested in how the acute experience under ketamine, MDMA, and psilocybin modulates brain activity changes under resting-state and tasks and its relevance to their therapeutic effect. Xue received the SOBP Travel Award in 2022.
In her spare time, Xue enjoys swimming, dog training, and painting nails.
Postdoctoral Fellow
PanLab Staff
PanLab Staff
PanLab Students
PanLab Students
Graduate Students
Graduate Students
Undergraduate Students
Undergraduate Students
Interns
Interns
Sean Nesamoney
Sean Nesamoney is a Menlo School student here in the Bay Area. He is passionate about using technology to pioneer innovation in the field of neuroscience as well as using music as a means to improve the well-being of individuals, especially teens.
Sean is a H.S. intern at the Panlab, part of Stanford's Center for Precision Mental Health & Wellness. With mentorship from Dr. Leanne Williams, he's worked on various projects in the field of neuroscience. Some of these projects include developing a user interface for Mentaid, a wearable device to monitor individuals' mental health that the lab had created prior to Sean joining. He is currently working on an individual research paper, studying how various mental health diagnoses impair cognitive function. Sean is also the student leader of PMHW's Creative Science Communications Group, a cohort of H.S. students passionate about raising mental health awareness from a scientific lens.
Sean is the founding director of "Menlo Voices for Hope,” a student-led organization that recently put on a benefit concert to raise awareness about teen mental health, with a focus on how students have used the arts to cope with the COVID pandemic.
Additionally, Sean is a published app developer of a free mobile app called "Muse: Music for the Mind." Muse is a music recommendation platform to help teens find songs that suit their mental health needs. Using an emotionally-cognizant machine learning algorithm, Muse suggests songs to users based on their current mental state.
A two-time semi-finalist in the International Songwriting Competition, Sean is eager to continue his musical endeavors, his work with Menlo Voices for Hope, and his research at the Center.
PanLab Alumni
PanLab Alumni
Ritchie Abracosa
Program Project Coordinator
Stanford Health Care
Andrew Bueno, MD
BIDMC
Sarah Chang
PhD Candidate
UCLA Neuroscience
Elizabeth Chin, PhD
Assistant Professor of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University
David Choi
Fellow, concurrent degree
Asian American Studies, M.A., and Social Welfare, M.S.W.
UCLA
John Coman
Carlos Correa, PhD
Postdoctoral fellow
NYU
Persephone Crittenden, PsyD
Neuropsychologist & Brain Health Consultant
Adina Fischer, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor
Stanford Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Scotty Fleming, PhD
Machine Learning Scientist @ SmarterDx
Druty Ghanta
Katherine Grisanzio, PhD
Postdoctoral fellow
Harvard Psychology
Jake Hartley
Data Quality Lead
Genentech
Bailey Holt-Gosselin
PhD Candidate in Psychology and Neuroscience, Yale
Catherine Kircos
Analytics in Clinical Research Operations
Amgen
Monica Kullar, PhD
Senior User Researcher
Everway
Emily Livermore, PsyD
Clinical Asst Professor
Stanford Psychiatry &
Behavioral Sciences
Celestine Navarro
Global Commercial Strategy & Operations
Gilead Sciences
Adam Pines, PhD
After completing PhD at UPenn, returned to Williams PanLab as a postdoc
Matthew Sacchet, PhD
Associate Professor
Harvard
Melissa Shiner
Brooke Staveland
PhD Student
UC Berkeley Neuroscience
Serena Tally
MD Candidate
UC Irvine School of Medicine
Zach Taylor
Data Scientist
Grand Rounds, Inc.
Lauren Whicker
Human Factor Engineer Apple
Joseph Wielgosz, PhD
Health Science Specialist
National Center for PTSD
Christina B. Young, PhD
Instructor
Stanford Neurology and Neurological Sciences
Cheryl Zhang, MD
NYU Langone Health
Sahar Harati, PhD
Google
Megan Chesnut
Moved to industry
Arielle Keller, PhD
Assistant Professor
Psychological Sciences
University of Connecticut
Akua Nimarko, PhD
Boston Consulting Group
Carolina Ramirez
Imaging Data Scientist
Center for Intelligent Imaging, UCSF
Tali Ball, PhD
Head of Clinical Product Development
Big Health
Patrick Stetz
Data Scientist
LinkedIn
Esther Anene
PhD Student
Columbia Clinical Psychology
Jacob Brawer
COO, Attunement AI
Katie Warthen, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Neuroimaging Research, Data Sciences & Bioinformatics
Alcyone
Neuroimaging Research, Data Sciences & Bioinformatics
Alcyone
Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, PhD
Assistant Professor Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
Claudia Padula, PhD
Assistant Professor
Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
Helen Shi Qiu
Ruth Ling
Medical Student Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine
Emily Zhai, MS
Analyst
Edge Health
Sarah Hagerty, PhD
Lyra Health
Nancy Gray
MSW Student
Columbia University
Funmi Solano
Anna Oft
Rishu Garg
Rennie Kendrick
Sarah Izabel
Samantha Zenteno
Olamide Abiose, PhD
Rachel Barry
Richa Wadekar
Shanee Regev
Claire Bertrand
PhD Student in Clinical Psychology
Northwestern University
Jenna Jubeir
PhD Student in Neuroscience
Mt. Sinai
Lisa Olmsted, MD
Jessica Laudie
Collaborators
Collaborators
Zhenan Bao, PhD
Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, PhD
Mayuresh Korgaonkar, PhD
Jun Ma, MD, PhD
Michelle Madore, PhD
Carolyn Rodriguez, MD, PhD
Alan Schatzberg, MD
Patricia Suppes, MD, PhD
Max Wintermark, MD, MBA
Lisa Goldman Rosas, PhD, MPH
Olusola Ajilore, MD, PhD
Manish Saggar, PhD