Sarah Lisanby

Sarah H. Lisanby (b. ca 1965)[1] is an American psychiatrist who studies the use of neurostimulation devices to treat mental illness.

Since 2015 she has directed the division of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) working on translational research.

[2] While she was a resident, she witnessed a woman with catatonic major depressive disorder undergo a dramatic remission after being treated with electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and this set the course for the rest of her career.

[1] After she graduated she undertook a fellowship at the New York Psychiatric Institute under Harold A. Sackeim, who had been doing research on ways to reduce the adverse effects of ECT on memory by using magnets to induce seizures in the brain instead of delivering electricity directly, a therapeutic mode called magnetic seizure therapy (MST).

[4][5] By 2010 Lisanby had led two scientific societies focused on neurostimulation and had published 150 papers; at that time she moved back to Duke.