Dr. Peter van Roessel, MD PhD, completed his MD at Stanford University and his residency training in psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, with additional training in psychodynamic psychotherapy (TFP) via the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Prior to joining the clinical faculty at Stanford, he worked for several years as Associate Director of the general research unit of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, a premier state-funded research hospital affiliated with Columbia University.

At Stanford, Dr. van Roessel sees adult mood and anxiety disorders outpatients through the Assessment Clinics and participates in resident training and patient care as director of the resident Continuity Clinic and as a supervisor in psychodynamic psychotherapy. He additionally directs the third-year resident curriculum in psychopathology and psychopharmacology. As a member of the department's Rodriguez Translational Therapeutics Lab, he sees individuals with obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders for evaluations and research-protocol driven clinical treatment and contributes to and leads clinical neuroscience studies pioneering rapid-acting interventions in OCD. Clinically motivated research interests include the nature and neural correlates of metacognitive ‘awareness’ (insight) in OCD and related disorders, and particularly the relationship of awareness to mechanisms of attentional control.

Dr. van Roessel pursued research training in basic neuroscience prior to his clinical training, completing an MPhil in Biology via the Open University, UK, for research performed at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen Germany, and a PhD in molecular and developmental neurobiology at the University of Cambridge, UK. He has contributed to work in the lab of Dr Julia Kaltschmidt (Stanford) on studies of GABAergic/Glutamatergic interneuronal circuity in mouse. He received a 2018 NARSAD Young Investigator Award to pursue study of nitrous oxide as a rapid-acting treatment for OCD, he was a 2020-2022 Miller Foundation Fellow, and from 2020 to 2022 was a Advanced Fellow in Mental Illness Treatment and Research via the Sierra Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center of the Palo Alto VA. Dr. van Roessel is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a member of the American College of Psychiatrists.