Personnel

Elias Aboujaoude, M.D., M.A.
Dr. Elias Aboujaoude is a Clinical Professor and the Director of the OCD Clinic and the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He received a BS in Molecular and Cell Biology and a BA in French Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He then went on to complete his MD and an MA in Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he also completed his residency in Psychiatry. In the OCD Research Program, Dr. Aboujaoude has seen patients for studies on depression, dysthymia, anxiety, pathological gambling and OCD. He is the author and co-editor of several books, including: Compulsive Acts: A Psychiatrist's Tales of Ritual and Obsession and Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality.

Alan Ringold, M.D.
Dr. Ringold graduated from Tulane University School of Medicine and completed a Residency in Internal Medicine at Stanford and a Residency in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania . Since 1969, he has been in the private practice of psychiatry in Palo Alto and on the Clinical Faculty at Stanford Medical School where he has the position of Clinical Professor of Psychiatry. Dr. Ringold has been an investigator in the use of Anafranil in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a co-investigator in the use of Prozac and Zoloft in the treatment of OCD. He is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and has served as an Examiner for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

Carolyn Rodriguez, M.D., Ph.D.
Dr. Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor and Director of Translational OCD Research at Stanford University School of Medicine. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Computer Science and completed her M.D., Ph.D at Harvard Medical School. She completed her psychiatry residency and postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University. She was recruited in July, 2015 to direct the Rodriguez Translational Therapeutics Lab, which utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to find novel treatments for patients suffering from compulsive behaviors such as Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and hoarding disorder. In addition to her research, Dr. Rodriguez also works to educate the public about compulsive behaviors and anxiety disorders by contributing to The Huffington Post on topics such as clutter, ketamine, and the science of fear.

Nolan Williams, M.D.
Dr. Williams is an Instructor and Director of the Clinical Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Research Program.  Dr. Williams’ life-long interest in the neurosciences has led him to pursue a career in medicine. During medical school, he developed a specific interest in focal brain stimulation for neuropsychiatric illness and sought a combined psychiatry-neurology residency program that would give him excellent clinical exposure to a wide variety of brain stimulation modalities, a built-in research fellowship, and opportunities to work with mentors experienced in neuropsychiatric trial design and implementation. His search kept me at the Medical University of South Carolina where, under the guidance of his mentors, Drs. Mark George and Ziad Nahas, he fostered the skills necessary to become an interventional neuropsychiatrist and physician-scientist. During his residency training, Dr. Williams also had the unique opportunity to complete the Interventional Psychiatry Track that he helped to establish while at MUSC. Dr. Williams published a method for integrating interventional psychiatry into residency and fellowship training, which has become a model system across the country. Through this interventional psychiatry track, Dr. Williams was able to develop clinical rTMS as well as deep brain stimulation programming skillsets. During his research fellowship, he completed a five-year follow-up study of five patients who received epidural cortical stimulation (EpCS) for treatment-resistant depression. He also worked as a Co-I on a study investigating interleaved TMS-BOLD as a tool to probe the neural circuitry affected in Tourette's syndrome.

Lorrin M. Koran, M.D.
Dr. Lorrin Koran is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. After an illustrious career in research and clinical care, including many years as Director of the OCD Clinic, Dr. Koran is now fully retired from clinical practice. However, he still gives generously of his time to the clinic and frequently consults with faculty and trainees.