Leslie Adams

Leslie Adams is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Public Mental Health and Population Sciences in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research examines how structural racism, gender norms, and psychosocial stress shape mental health outcomes. She uses mixed-methods approaches, including ecological momentary assessment and passive smartphone sensing, to study real-time stressors such as racial discrimination and their links to depression and suicidality. Her scholarship also includes comparative mental health work across the African continent and South America, emphasizing contextual and cross-cultural insights into suicide risk and digital mental health. Dr. Adams’ work has appeared in JAMA Psychiatry, American Psychologist, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine, and she has served as principal investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

She has received honors including the NIMHD Health Disparities Institute Award and the AFSP Young Investigator Award and has contributed as a subject matter expert for SAMHSA, NIH, and MQ: Transforming Mental Health.

Before joining Stanford, she was an Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a David E. Bell Fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She earned her PhD in Health Behavior from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MPH in Health Policy from The Dartmouth Institute, and a BA in Neuroscience from Dartmouth College.