Nolan Williams, MD, an immensely creative and forward-thinking physician-scientist who pioneered fast-acting treatments for severe mental health conditions, including rapid transcranial magnetic brain stimulation for depression and ibogaine therapy for PTSD, died Oct. 8 at his home in Northern California. He was 43.
Those who knew the professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences remember him as a hard-working, ambitious and open-minded scientist; a caring clinician who gave comfort to those mired in despair; a generous collaborator and mentor; a passionate kitesurfer; and a loving husband and father. Many of his patients credited him for saving their lives.
“Nolan Williams worked tirelessly to help patients for whom existing treatments had failed,” said Lloyd Minor, MD, dean of the school of medicine and vice president for medical affairs at Stanford University. “He inspired us to think bigger and aim higher, and his innovative discoveries will continue to change lives for the better for generations to come.”
Williams arrived at Stanford Medicine as an instructor in 2014, having completed residencies in psychiatry and neurology at the Medical University of South Carolina. There he had become fascinated with the emerging field of neuromodulation under the mentorship of Mark George, MD, who originated the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation to study and modulate mood-regulating brain circuits.
Over an 11-year career at Stanford Medicine, Williams initiated and collaborated on a stunning array of research projects that he saw as part of a paradigm shift in psychiatry. He referred to the new frontier, which focuses on recalibrating errant brain circuits, as psychiatry 3.0, surpassing psychiatry 1.0, which relies on psychotherapy, and psychiatry 2.0, which targets neurochemistry.
“As I witnessed the difference he was making — the patients who were just transformed by the care he was providing — that’s when I started seeing how, for the first time in human history, we had the ability to not only ease people’s suffering, but actually to reverse and perhaps even to cure mental illness,” said Laura Roberts, MD, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Katharine Dexter McCormick and Stanley McCormick Memorial Professor. “It was Nolan’s work that inspired that confidence.”
Stimulating the brain
Williams is most known for developing a rapid version of transcranial magnetic brain stimulation for severe depression. Known as Stanford Neuromodulation Therapy or SNT, the protocol delivers 18,000 magnetic pulses per day for five days, compared with the 3,000 pulses per day for four to six weeks in traditional transcranial magnetic brain stimulation.
“We speculated maybe these patients were being under-dosed with the traditional forms of TMS,” Williams said in 2018.
SNT incorporates fMRI brain imaging to more accurately direct the magnetic pulses to the brain circuit implicated in depression, which varies slightly in location from person to person.
He was an exceptional physician-scientist. We all wonder what he would have invented next year or 10 years from now and what a difference these contributions would have made.”
—Laura Roberts
In a double-blinded trial published by Williams in 2021, nearly 80% of patients with moderate to severe treatment-resistant depression who received SNT experienced remission within a month, compared with 13% who received a placebo treatment. For some patients, relief arrived by the second or third day of SNT treatment — like flipping a switch.
Williams’ team determined that SNT works by correcting the flow of misdirected brain signals. Patients with more severe depression are more likely to have these abnormal brain signals, which can be detected with fMRI, and are more likely to respond to SNT treatment.
In 2022, the FDA approved the treatment for major depressive disorder that does not respond to medications. SNT technology is commercially available as the SAINT neuromodulation system through Magnus Medical, to which Williams was an advisor.
“What he became very interested in, generally, are the mechanisms that underlie rapid responses to treatments,” said Alan Schatzberg, MD, the Kenneth T. Norris, Jr. Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, who became a mentor to Williams. He said Williams seemed to always have the energy to check out a new idea. “He could really grasp a concept and then run with it. He had that drive,” Schatzberg said.
Ibogaine therapy
In 2018, Williams began pursuing an even less orthodox avenue of fast-acting mental health treatment. He was connected with a nonprofit called VETS that was helping veterans with traumatic brain injury, PTSD and other mental health problems access ibogaine, a psychoactive substance derived from the root of the central African shrub iboga. The substance is banned from medical use in the U.S., but a handful of veterans had tried ibogaine therapy in Mexico and reported life-changing improvements.
It took a year for Williams to convince the Stanford Institutional Review Board, which must approve all human trials, to greenlight the research. In 2022, his team studied 30 special operative veterans before and after they underwent ibogaine therapy at a clinic in Mexico. One month after treatment, the veterans experienced average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms.
Based in part on the dramatic results of that trial, in June 2025, Texas approved a $50 million initiative to fund clinical trials of ibogaine — one of the largest government investments in psychedelic therapy.
The Brain Stimulation Lab was the hub for Williams’ numerous research interests; it grew to some 40 people, with more than 20 ongoing projects, including brain stimulation trials for bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction. He collaborated with researchers throughout Stanford Medicine and beyond.
With Schatzberg, he made the surprising discovery that ketamine’s quick antidepressant effects relied on the opioid system. When they gave participants an opioid-receptor blocker prior to giving them ketamine, the antidepressant effects all but disappeared.
Teaming up with psychiatrist David Spiegel, MD, the Jack, Lulu, and Sam Willson Professor in Medicine, Williams showed that two minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation could temporarily increase a person’s hypnotizability, which was thought to be a largely immutable quality. The technique could make hypnotherapy, to treat conditions like chronic pain, an option for more patients.
“I’m an agnostic psychiatric tool builder,” Williams told Stanford Medicine magazine in 2024. “If it’s safe for the patient and the risk-benefit ratio is right, we’ll look at it. My job is to find tools that can help people feel more like themselves.”
Tae kwon do lessons
Nolan Ryan Williams was born on June 25, 1982, in Bamberg, South Carolina, and grew up in Charleston. He was the eldest son of Bryan Williams, a fisherman, and Ann (Hewitt) Williams, who ran a day care center and later worked as a caterer.
He started tae kwon do lessons when he was 8, earned a junior black belt at 15 and won two world championships in college. His senior thesis project at Academic Magnet High School was about how tae kwon do could boost self-confidence and improve mood.
The community and ethos of the sport made a lasting impression on Williams, and he often referenced its five tenets: courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control and indomitable spirit.
“I know those meant a lot to him; he tried to embody those in his life,” said Chris Austelle, MD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, who grew up in the same town and remembers, at 5 years old, taking tae kwon do lessons from a tall, lanky teenage Williams. In high school, Austelle reconnected with Williams as a mentor and was inspired to follow in his footsteps, joining the Brain Stimulation Lab in 2023.
Williams earned a bachelor’s in biology from the College of Charleston in 2003 and a medical degree from the Medical University of South Carolina in 2008. He stayed at MUSC for residencies in neurology and psychiatry and fellowships in clinical neuromodulation and human neuroscience.
Schatzberg met Williams for the first time in 2013 at a psychiatry career development program run jointly by the University of Pittsburgh and Stanford University. “You could see he was obviously a bright fellow and was really committed to building a research career,” recalled Schatzberg, who is a co-director of the program.
Williams already had a job prospect in the Bay Area, but found that his interests were more aligned with the brain stimulation work at Stanford Medicine. “We arranged for him to talk to some people here, and he eventually joined our group at Stanford, which was a big gain for us,” Schatzberg said.
Rob Malenka, MD, PhD, the Nancy Friend Pritzker Professor in Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, remembers Williams showing up at his office around that time, seeking advice. “I just remember thinking, this guy’s sharp, this guy’s smart, this guy seems to be really wanting to do innovative stuff for all the right reasons,” said Malenka, who became a mentor and friend.
Williams arrived at Stanford Medicine in the fall of 2014 and opened the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab in 2015. That spring, he saw Kristin Raj, MD, at the time a resident in psychiatry, in the hallway of the psychiatry building. They were immediately struck with each other, Raj said.
They married in 2019 at a ceremony in the Azores, an archipelago off the western coast of Portugal, with Schatzberg officiating.
Williams was a highly skilled kite surfer, having picked up the hobby in college when few people had heard of it. “He started trying to figure out how to kite surf back before it was safe to kite surf,” said Raj, who is chief of interventional psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “He was trying to figure it out well before it was cool to do. But that’s how he was about everything.”
Williams was promoted to assistant professor in 2019, associate professor in 2023 and full professor this past summer. As his lab grew, he displayed a talent for finding the right people for the job, entrusting them fully and enabling them to succeed. “He wasn’t afraid of giving out responsibilities,” Austelle said. “I think that gave him more time to swing back and forth among various projects.”
Williams and Raj still found time to attend concerts and travel widely — at first to kite surfing hot spots around the world and, after they had kids, to snowboarding destinations.
He possessed an unflappable calmness in challenging situations, which extended from international travel with a toddler to complex research dilemmas. “He never seemed to lose his cool,” Malenka said.
“What I heard from people is that they were intimidated before they met him,” Austelle said. “But then when they actually met him, they were surprised by how humble and welcoming he was and how willing he was to help.”
Williams was driven by a strong sense of calling to his work, Raj said. “I think he really felt like that’s what he was here on Earth to do.”
“People miss him because he was a wonderful person, but also there’s this sense of all that was lost,” Roberts said. “He was an exceptional physician-scientist. We all wonder what he would have invented next year or 10 years from now and what a difference these contributions would have made.”
His death “is such an important example that we need more research on severe mental illness,” Malenka said. “We need better ways of detecting it, and we need to continue his legacy of finding much better ways of treating severe mental illness.”
Williams published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, gave more than 200 presentations and interviews to scientific and lay audiences, and held more than a dozen patents. He was a member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the American Neuropsychiatric Association, the American Academy of Neurology, the American Psychiatric Association, Stanford Bio-X and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. He was recognized by a number of research awards, including the Klerman Prize and Colvin Prize from the Brain and Behavior Foundation and the Joel Elkes Research Award (posthumously) from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.
In addition to his wife, Williams is survived by his mother; his brother; and two children, Hendrix and Autumn.
