Lawrence Yang

Dr. Lawrence Yang is the Pauline Gratz Distinguished Professor of Nursing at Duke University School of Nursing (DUSON), and Professor in the Duke Department of Population Health. He also is Associate Director of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Core at the Center for AIDS Research at Duke University. His work focuses on stigma as a multi-level determinant of health—spanning individual, clinical, and societal levels—through research, education, and training. Prior to joining Duke, Dr. Yang served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at NYU’s School of Global Public Health, where he also founded the Global Mental Health and Stigma Program, supported by the Li Ka Shing Foundation. Dr. Yang’s interdisciplinary training includes clinical psychology (Boston University), psychiatric epidemiology (Columbia University), and medical anthropology (Harvard University). He has received six national awards for his work on stigma, including the 2021 Maltz Prize for Innovative Schizophrenia Research (see link). Dr. Yang has over 195 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals such as the JAMA, JAMA Psychiatry, British Journal of Psychiatry, and American Journal of Public Health Dr. Yang is currently PI or multiple PI on several NIH R01 grants (below), is mPI of a D43 Implementation Science Training Grant in Vietnam, and is a collaborator on several other R01-level grants. He previously served as a Standing Reviewer for the NIMH Mental Health Services Research Committee (SERV) (2020-2024). He is also pioneering research on “Migration Stigma,” having led (with Dr.’s Bruce Link and Maureen Eger) a think tank and conference sponsored by the Ernst Strüngmann Forum (see link). This work culminated in a book published by MIT Press and a related article in JAMA.

Dr. Yang’s research centers on two key areas. The first examines stigma across various health conditions—such as mental illness, HIV, cancer, and opioid use—and its intersection with marginalized identities (e.g., race, gender, immigration), focusing on multi-level stigma interventions. To address how stigma is shaped by culture and context, Dr. Yang advanced a foundational theory elucidating how stigma threatens one’s ability to engage in the culturally valued roles that ‘matter most’.  To support global efforts, Dr. Yang has applied this framework to measuring and intervening with HIV stigma among women with HIV in Botswana through an NIMH-funded R21 and current R01 grant (TW012402; mPI Yang). This led to his role as a scientific member of the NIH/NIMH HIV-Related Intersectional Stigma Working Group (2020) and a Plenary Address at the NCI’s Global Cancer Stigma Research Workshop (2022). Named as an expert stigma technical consultant for the CDC in 2022, Dr. Yang now applies his expertise to the opioid crisis, focusing on reducing stigma around medication for opioid use disorder in rural North Carolina through peer and clinic-based interventions.

Dr. Yang’s second research focus is on global mental health in low- and middle-income countries, emphasizing implementation science and psychiatric epidemiology. As contact PI, he recently completed an NIMH-funded R01 (with mPI, Dr. Judy Bass; MH122851) to validate a pragmatic assessment tool of modifiable critical factors affecting the implementation of task-sharing mental health strategies globally. In China, Dr. Yang leads as contact PI of two NIMH-funded R01 studies (MH108385; MH127631; with mPI's, Dr.’s Michael Phillips, William Stone and Matcheri Keshavan) examining cognition in completely untreated schizophrenia, enrolling ~900 participants across untreated, treated, and healthy control groups. Findings published in JAMA Psychiatry (2020) indicate that psychosis remaining untreated over decades is linked to cognitive decline, suggesting possible neurodegenerative processes. A longitudinal NIMH-funded R01 grant (2021–2026) to follow-up this rare cohort is ongoing, leveraging China’s national psychosis treatment program, with expansion of this study paradigm underway in India and Nigeria.