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Biography

Murray B Stein MD, MPH, FRCPC is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). He is also a Staff Psychiatrist at the VA San Diego Healthcare System. Dr. Stein graduated from the University of Manitoba and completed his residency and post-residency fellowship at the University of Toronto and at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. He subsequently completed a Master of Public Health degree at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD.

Dr. Stein’s research interests include the epidemiology, neurobiology, and treatment of anxiety and trauma-and-stressor-related disorders especially social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. He has written or co-written over 800 peer-reviewed scientific articles on these topics, including in journals such as JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Genetics, Nature Neuroscience, The Lancet, American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and JAMA Psychiatry. His federally funded research has included studies of interventions for anxiety disorders in primary care, pharmacological approaches to treatment-resistant anxiety disorders, and functional neuroimaging and genomic research in anxiety and trauma-and-stressor-related disorders. He is Co-Principal Investigator (with Robert Ursano MD) of Army STARRS, a NIMH-funded project (2009-2015) investigating risk factors for suicide, PTSD and other deployment-related disorders; this project is now in a longitudinal follow-up phase funded by the Department of Defense as STARRS-LS (2019-2025). He is also Co-Principal Investigator for the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) PTSD initiative (2019-2029) funded by NIMH. He is also Co-PI (with Joel Gelernter MD at Yale) of a NIMH-funded study on expanding genetic understanding of depression, anxiety and their treatments (2024-2029), in conjunction with the VA Million Veteran Program. Dr. Stein also collaborates with Dr. Charles Taylor on numerous psychosocial and pharmacological intervention studies. Dr. Stein is an Executive Committee member for the multi-center TRACK-TBI Study (PI: Geoff Manley MD, PhD at UCSF).

Dr. Stein is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Anxiety and Depression Association of American (ADAA), and a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). He is a past Scientific Chair of the NIMH Interventions in Mood and Anxiety (ITMA) Review Group (2006-2009) and was a member of the DSM-5 Anxiety, Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum, Posttraumatic, and Dissociative Disorders Work Group (2009-2013). He is a past member of the National Academy of Medicine Board on the Health of Select Populations (2012-2015) and the National Academy of Medicine Committee to Review NASA's Evidence Reports on Human Health Risks (2016). He is a past member of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee (PDAC) (2011-2016). He consults frequently with the pharmaceutical industry regarding drug development for anxiety and stress-related disorders.

Dr. Stein is Co-Editor-in-Chief for UpToDate in Psychiatry, Past Editor-in-Chief for the journal Depression and Anxiety (2017-2022), and a Deputy Editor for the journal Biological Psychiatry.