Bio
Dr. Eshel (he/him/his) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine.
His clinical focus is the full-spectrum mental health care of sexual and gender minorities, with particular interest in depression, anxiety, and the complex effects of trauma in this population. He works in collaboration with other primary care and mental health providers at the Stanford LGBTQ+ program.
His research interests (www.staarlab.com) include the use of optogenetic, electrophysiological, neuroimaging, and behavioral approaches to probe the neural circuits of reward processing, decision making, and social behavior. He has won multi-year grants from the National Institutes of Health, Burroughs-Wellcome Fund, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and Simons Foundation to further his research.
Dr. Eshel has published articles on dopamine and motivation, the neuroscience of irritability, LGBTQ health, reward and punishment processing in depression, behavioral predictors of substance use among adolescents, and the mechanism of transcranial magnetic stimulation. His work has appeared in Nature, Science, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, Annual Review of Neuroscience, JAMA, JAMA Psychiatry, Neuropsychopharmacology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Journal of Neuroscience. He is a co-inventor on a patent pending for a new class of drugs for addiction, and also the author of the book Learning: The Science Inside, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He has delivered presentations on the neural circuits of motivated behavior, anger expression in patients with PTSD, how dopamine facilitates learning, and LGBTQ-related topics at departmental seminars in London, Zurich, and Tel Aviv, and at the meetings of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, Society of Biological Psychiatry, and Association of American Medical Colleges, among others. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, and an ad-hoc reviewer for numerous publications including Nature, Science, JAMA Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and Current Biology.
Dr. Eshel has won honors for his scholarship and advocacy, including the Marshall Scholarship, the Outstanding Resident Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Science and SciLifeLab Grand Prize for Young Scientists, the Freedman Award (honorable mention) from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Polymath Award from Stanford's psychiatry department, and the National LGBT Health Achievement Award.
He is a member of the American Psychiatric Association, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, Society of Biological Psychiatry, Association of Gay & Lesbian Psychiatrists, Society for Neuroscience, and other professional associations. He is also an advocate for LGBTQ rights, recently serving as the chair of Stanford's LGBTQ+ Benefits Advocacy Committee.
Prior to Stanford, Dr. Eshel trained and conducted research at the National Institutes of Health, Princeton University, the World Health Organization, University College London, and Harvard University.
