Prof Dan Joseph Stein is a South African psychiatrist and one of the continent’s most influential scholars in psychiatry and mental health. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and Director of the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) Unit on Risk & Resilience in Mental Disorders. He previously served as Director of UCT’s pioneering Brain and Behaviour Initiative and was the inaugural Scientific Director of UCT’s Neuroscience Institute, the first of its kind on the African continent. He has also held visiting professorships at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the United States and at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Stein studied medicine at UCT, where he also completed an intercalated undergraduate degree in biochemistry and psychology. He went on to specialize in psychiatry and undertook a post-doctoral fellowship in psychopharmacology at Columbia University. He later earned two doctoral degrees—in clinical neuroscience and in philosophy—from Stellenbosch University.
His work spans the psychobiology, assessment, and management of anxiety, obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, and traumatic and stress-related conditions. He has also mentored and contributed to research in areas of particular importance to Africa, including maternal mental health, neuroHIV/AIDS, and substance use disorders. His scholarship bridges basic neuroscience, clinical investigations and trials, and epidemiological and public mental health research, exemplifying an integrated biopsychosocial approach. Importantly, he has worked to advance psychiatric services, training, and research in the low- and middle-income country context, shaping models of integrative mental health care in South Africa and across the continent.
As Chair of Psychiatry at UCT, Stein has led initiatives to strengthen and modernize psychiatric services, research, and training. He established the SAMRC Unit on Anxiety & Stress Disorders, which pioneered brain imaging and neurogenetics research in South Africa, and conducted the first nationally representative community survey of mental disorders on the African continent. He has played a central role in building research capacity through collaborations and mentorship. He co-led the Neuro-GAP study, bringing together scientists from Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, and Uganda to advance genetic research on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and he is the founding President of the African College of Neuropsychopharmacology (AfCNP).
Globally, Stein has been a key contributor to large-scale research collaborations, including the ENIGMA consortium on neuroimaging and the World Mental Health Surveys on psychiatric epidemiology. He also chaired the DSM-5 and ICD-11 workgroups on obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, shaping international diagnostic standards.
Prof. Stein is consistently ranked among the most highly cited researchers worldwide in the field of anxiety disorders, with a Google Scholar h-index exceeding 150, among the highest of any African scientist. His work has appeared in leading journals such as Science, The Lancet, and World Psychiatry. He has authored or edited over 40 books, including the Textbook of Anxiety Disorders, the Textbook of Mood Disorders, the Handbook of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, and Global Mental Health and Psychotherapy. In addition, he has published hundreds of research articles and book chapters across neuroscience, psychiatry, and global mental health, contributing significantly to the field’s knowledge base.