Bruce McEwen, PhD

One of the originators of the concept of allostatic load, Bruce S. McEwen, PhD, is the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor and Head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University. A neuroscientist and neuroendocrinologist, Dr. McEwen is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He served as President of the Society for Neuroscience in 1997-98.

Dr. McEwen is a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health, in which he is helping to reformulate concepts and measurements related to stress and stress hormones in the context of human societies. His laboratory discovered adrenal steroid receptors in the hippocampus in 1968. He is the co-author of a new book with science writer Elizabeth Lasley, The End of Stress as We Know It.

Teresa Seeman, PhD

Teresa Seeman, Professor of Medicine & Epidemiology, Division of Geriatrics, is an epidemiologist with expertise in the role of social and psychological factors in health and aging. Her research specifically focuses on understanding the biological pathways through which social and psychological factors impact on health and she has extensive experience in the development and implementation of protocols for the collection of an array of different biomarkers, including blood spots, venous blood samples, saliva, and urine.

Dr. Seeman has been instrumental in developing summary measures of multi-systems allostatic load and testing their construct validity. In addition to showing evidence linking summary indices of allostatic load to subsequent health risks, Dr. Seeman and colleagues have also shown that levels of allostatic load in both older and more middle-aged cohorts are predicted by social factors, including levels of social integration and support as well as more traditional measures of socio-economic status. Most recently, Dr. Seeman was the principal investigator on an ancillary study to assess allostatic load in a subset of subjects from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study (CARDIA).

Eugene Somoza, MD, PhD

Dr. Somoza is a psychiatrist with a PhD in physics and a strong interest in the development of mathematical models in medicine and psychiatry. He has 26 publications in the optimization of diagnostic tests in medicine and psychiatry. He also has both basic science research experience, and clinical research experience in substance abuse.

Dr. Somoza gained significant clinical psychiatric experience as the Director of the Psychiatric Evaluation Center at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center for seven years. At present he is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and Director and Principal Investigator of the Ohio Valley Node of NIDA’s Clinical Trials Network, as well as the Director of the Cincinnati Addiction Research Center. In his current capacity he supervises individuals in a 12-state area in the Midwest dedicated to performing research studies in the area of substance abuse.

Ralph I. Horwitz, MD

Ralph I. Horwitz, MD, is the Arthur Bloomfield Professor and the chair of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University. Dr. Horwitz received his M.D. from Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine; trained in internal medicine at McGill University and the Massachusettes General Hospital; and was a research fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Yale. He is internationally known for his pioneering research that helped to establish the field of clinical investigation and outcomes research; for his innovative programs in the education of physicians and the training of physician scientists; and his visionary renewal of the social contract linking the practice of medicine to the civic responsibility of the profession of medicine. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Association of American Physicians (AAP). He recently completed a term as president of the American Board of Internal Medicine and member of the council of the AAP.

Sonia Lupien, PhD

Dr. Sonia Lupien is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress at the Douglas Hospital in Montreal, Canada, and is a scientist affiliated with the Development of Physciatry at McGill University. She received her undergraduate education in psychology (B.Sc.), neurolopyschology (M.Sc.) and neurosciences (Ph.D.) at the University of Montreal, and she completed post-doctoral research training at the University of California in San Diego and the Rockefeller University in New York. She leads the Laboratory of Human Stress Research specializes in measuring the acute and chronic impact of stress hormones in older adults are linked to both memory impairments and atrophy of the hippocampus, a brain structure critical to memory  and which shrinks as Alzheimer Disease progresses. Two years later, she showed that children from low socioeconomic status present  higher levels of stress hormones, when compared to children from high socioeconomic status. Her future projects include a research program on detection and intervention for stress in the workplace, as well as the development of the DeStress for Success Program that aims at educating children and teenagers on stress and its impact on learning and memory.

Arun Karlamangla, PhD, MD

Arun S. Karlamangla, PhD, MD, is Assistant Professor in Geriatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. In addition to a faculty practice in geriatrics, Dr. Karlamangla teaches classes in research methods and data analysis, and does clinical research in the epidemiology of aging-related diseases

He has done innovative work in the prediction of cardiovascular disease and hip fracture risk in older adults and the role of psychosocial stressors and stress hormones in the development of physical and cognitive impairments. He has just completed a clinical trial of yoga to improve physiological profiles of older adults. Dr. Karlamangla is principal investigator of an ongoing NIH project to develop and validate a cardiovascular risk score tailored to older adults and is UCLA principal investigator of a multi-site NIH project to study how hip strength changes in women as they go through menopause.

Judith Balk, MD

Dr. Judith Balk holds a Master’s in Public Policy and Master’s of Public Health and is a board-certified gynecologist who has completed specialty training in various aspects of integrative medicine. Her goal is to integrate Western medicine with complementary approaches such as nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction.

Dr. Balk is also board certified by the American Board of Holistic Medicine and completed acupuncture training and using acupuncture in her women’s health practice for over eight years. Dr. Balk has been a reviewer for the NIH’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine study section for the past eight years, and is an oral board examiner for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. She is currently a faculty member at the University Of Pittsburgh School Of Medicine and is the medical director of the Holistic Cancer Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in addition to being the program director for the NIH-funded Clinical and Translational Research Center.