Dr. Stephen M. Stahl received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Northwestern University in Chicago, as a member of the Honors Program in Medical Education, and his Ph.D. degree in pharmacology and physiology from the University of Chicago. Dr. Stahl has trained in three specialties: internal medicine at the University of Chicago; neurology at the University of California in San Francisco; and psychiatry at Stanford University. He is board certified in psychiatry. 

Dr. Stahl has held faculty positions at Stanford University, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Institute of Psychiatry London, the Institute of Neurology London, and, currently, as professor at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and as an Honorary Visiting Senior Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge in the UK. He also directs psychopharmacology services and academic programs for the eight-facility, 6500 patient California Department of State Hospital System, where he also heads their assessment and treatment efforts to reduce violence. Dr. Stahl was formerly Executive Director of Clinical Neurosciences at the Merck Neuroscience Research Center in the UK for several years. Dr. Stahl’s major interests are dedicated to producing and disseminating educational information about diseases and their treatments in psychiatry and neurology, with a special emphasis on multimedia, the internet and teaching how to teach.     

Dr. Stahl currently serves as editor-in-chief of CNS Spectrums. He is also past associate editor of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, former clinical field editor for the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology and is currently on numerous editorial boards of other leading journals including the ACNP’s journal Neuropsychopharmacology. He has conducted numerous research projects during his career awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), by the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) and by the pharmaceutical industry. Author of over 500 articles and chapters, and more than 1600 scientific presentations and abstracts, Dr. Stahl is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, and teacher in psychiatry with subspecialty expertise in psychopharmacology. Dr. Stahl has written 35 books and edited 12 others, including the best-selling and award-winning textbook, Stahl’s Essential Psychopharmacology, now in its fifth edition, the best-selling and award-winning clinical manual, Essential Psychopharmacology Prescriber’s Guide, now in its sixth edition.