Sarah Lisanby
American medical researcher
Sarah H. Lisanby (born c.1965) 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.
Career
Lisanby received dual undergraduate degrees in mathematics and psychology from Duke University in 1987 and received her MD there as well. She completed a residency in psychiatry, serving as chief resident. 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.
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). He asked her to work on developing a prototype that could do this, and by 2000 she and a team of collaborators had prepared one, and it was tested on a person in Switzerland. She also started investigating transcranial magnetic stimulation with Sackheim at the institute.
In 2005 she founded the Division of Brain Stimulation at Columbia University.
When Kitty Dukakis published her book about ECT in 2006 and in her subsequent advocacy for ECT, Lisanby has been asked to provide medical commentary on ECT.
By 2010 Lisanby had led two scientific societies focused on neurostimulation and had published 150 papers; at that time she moved back to Duke.
“Sarah Lisanby” enters the record as american medical researcher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sarah, Lisanby and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7422541. VIAF identifies the subject as 313526122. The Library of Congress control number is n2003131090. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1965, 2015, 1987 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sarah Lisanby” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.