Helen Blair Simpson, M.D., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the College of Physician and Surgeons of Columbia University and the current Director of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Dr. Simpson's research program focuses on how to improve treatments for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) so that they can live productive lives. Her research is interdisciplinary. It ranges from treatment development studies to clinical trials examining the effects of medication and cognitive-behavioral therapy to brain imaging studies exploring the brain mechanisms of OCD. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health and private foundations like the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. She was a member of the workgroup that developed the first Practice Guidelines for the Treatment of Patients with OCD for the American Psychiatric Association. She was recently invited to present her interdisciplinary research to the National Advisory Mental Health Council of the National Institutes of Mental Health.

Dr. Simpson graduated from Yale College with a BS in biology. She then entered the MD-PhD program at The Rockefeller University/Cornell University Medical College. For her PhD, she studied the brain pathways underlying learned versus unlearned vocalizations in songbirds. She then completed the internship and residency in psychiatry at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center/New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Simpson has been associated with the Anxiety Disorders Clinic since 1996, first as a National Institutes of Mental Health Research Fellow under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Liebowitz, and then as an independent researcher and Director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Research Program.