Laramie Duncan
Profile details
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Major Laboratories and Clinical Translational Neurosciences Incubator)
Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Affiliates
Dr. Duncan is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and a member of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Dr. Duncan is an interdisciplinary researcher with a strong computational background. With the long-term goal of identifying causal mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders, she earned a joint PhD in Neuroscience and Clinical Psychology and then undertook extensive postdoctoral training in Statistical Genetics to gain a deep understanding of genetic effects on psychiatric disorders. She led the analysis and writing of the flagship publications for two groups within the international Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC). She also served as analyst for benchmark international genomics projects including ExAC (exome sequencing data), BrainStorm (cross-disorder analysis of psychiatric phenotypes), and SwedEX (schizophrenia sequencing consortium). In these roles she conducted genome-wide association studies (GWAS), data quality analytics, and downstream functional analyses on over 50 datasets encompassing trillions of genotypes and terabytes of data. Thus, she has considerable analytical and "team science" experience both in leadership and analyst roles. Her prior work on rigor and reproducibility in genetics has been used to strengthen editorial policies at multiple journals and has encouraged greater statistical rigor in gene-environment interaction studies (e.g., Duncan & Keller, cited >1,200 times). Regarding functional genomic analyses, Dr. Duncan and colleagues have been among leading groups to integrate GWAS data with cell type taxonomies from single nucleus RNA sequencing (i.e. GWAS + snRNAseq) to infer the precise cell types underlying psychiatric and neurological disorders. Her first manuscript in this space focused on schizophrenia and demonstrated the validity and power of the method through informative comparison phenotypes (Duncan et al., 2025). Collectively her work has been cited over 33,000 times and is published in leading journals including Nature, Science, and Cell. Most recently, Dr. Duncan and colleagues have labeled precise cell types of interest in human brain tissue, opening the door to a deeper, and brain-wide, understanding of the cellular and molecular architecture of complex brain disorders.