Professor Dan Stein

Professor Dan Stein works on anxiety and related disorders, including OCD and PTSD. His approach is integrative, moving between bench (laboratory neuroscience), bed (clinical research), and bundu (public health). He has influenced the field through collaboration (locally and globally) and through mentorship (with many doctoral students now international figures).

At Stellenbosch University, he collaborated with colleagues to develop animal models of anxiety and related disorders, to initiate the first neuroimaging studies of these conditions locally, to commence the first genetic studies on them here, and to undertake the first nationally representative survey of mental disorders in Africa. Postgraduate students were trained in each of these fields.

He then moved to the University of Cape Town, where he helped to establish several local and international cohorts, so expanding his research, including transdisciplinary work, integrating neurobiological mechanisms and social determinants to understand mental health. He mentored the first local trainees in a number of psychiatric sub-specialties and established a Master’s in Neuroscience degree.

The quality of his and his team’s work is evidenced by competitive grant funding, by international scientific accolades, and by depth and breadth of publication. Specifically on anxiety disorders he is one of the most cited globally, more generally he is one of the most cited clinician-scientists in the global south. His highly regarded volume, Problems of Living, further extends transdisciplinarity, drawing together work in philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry.