Tony X. Liu

I hope to improve care for people with psychiatric conditions ❤️‍🩹🧠

I am a Bioengineering MD PhD student at Stanford, interested in developing better treatments for severe psychiatric conditions, such as major depression and addiction. I am advised by Professor Karl Deisseroth and work with the Human Neural Circuitry program. I think part of the solution lies in better understanding how the brain and body give rise to these conditions, and targeting these proximal causes. To this end, I'm interested in systems neuroscience and reverse translation across species, computational psychiatry, and spatially and temporally targeted treatment approaches (such as neural interfaces).

I also think part of improving mental health broadly lies in improving the equitable access to fundamental rights like housing, healthcare, and economic opportunity. To that end, I'm a co-founder of the Stanford Housing Equity Project, a group organizing and advocating around issues of homelessness, substance use, and health equity.

I'm grateful to be funded by the Knight-Hennessy Fellowship. I previously received a BS in Physics at Yale, and have worked on systems neuroscience in small brains and closed-loop neuromodulation for treatment-resistant depression.

🌼 Our team has been hard at work developing a contingency management intervention implementable at interim housing shelters, and part of the progress has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle. This all rests entirely on the tireless work of folks from our community partners, Caminar and LifeMoves.
🦟 Our work on predicting neural circuit functional properties (like connection strength) from synapse-level connectomics in fruit flies has come out in Current Biology. Please reach out with any questions and feedback! Lucky to have learned from Dr. Jamie Jeanne, Pasha Davoudian, and Dr. Kristyn Lizbinski at Yale :)
⚡ The first report of closed-loop deep brain stimulation for a patient with treatment-resistant depression has come out in Nature Medicine. See coverage of the clinical trial in CNN and the New York Times. So grateful to have worked with the big team including Drs. Katherine Scangos, Andrew Krystal, Eddie Chang, and Ankit Khambhati at UCSF.

misc

I'm also really interested in critical psychiatry and the limitations of biological psychiatry and over-medicalizing human wellness. Better understanding the brain and building better treatments may offer part of the solution to helping people with psychiatric conditions, but it's just as urgent to address the social determinants of these conditions -- like inequality, trauma, and racism. Please reach out if you ever want to chat about this, I'm always trying to learn more!
Credit for website design to Andrej Karpathy.