Dr. Lenze is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Director of the Healthy Mind Lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Lenze’s earned his MD degree and completed psychiatry residency at WashU and a geriatric psychiatry fellowship and a research fellowship at University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Lenze is renowned for his research in depression, anxiety, and cognitive functioning in older adults. Among his more than 350 publications are studies published in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Lancet.

Dr. Lenze is a leader in cutting-edge clinical trial designs. In 2020, he led a team that showed the drug fluvoxamine could prevent deterioration in acute COVID illness. His team is now testing treatment for long COVID, to find help for neuropsychiatric symptoms such as “brain fog.” In his new study in long COVID patients, patients participate remotely via their smartphones; this speeds up recruitment and improves the quality of outcome measurement.

Dr. Lenze’s research aims at reducing the negative outcomes of mental illness such as premature age-related morbidity. He is testing senolytic drugs to “turn back the clock on aging” in individuals with depression and other illnesses associated with accelerated aging (such as schizophrenia).

Dr. Lenze is also a champion of better ways to treat mental illness within the health system. In 2021, he established the first-ever Center for Perioperative Mental Health, aimed at bringing high-quality treatment for depression, anxiety, and other illness, into the perioperative sector.