The UC San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences has appointed accomplished clinician-researcher Aric A. Prather, PhD, as the new director of the Center for Health and Community (CHC), a local, regional, and national hub for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers committed to understanding and improving the social, psychological, and behavioral processes that drive health and health equity.
Prather, a professor and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, has been serving as interim director of the center since the 2022 retirement of CHC founder Nancy Adler, PhD. He received his doctoral degree in clinical and biological health psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and has been a UCSF faculty member since 2012. Prather was named an associate director of the CHC in 2014 and currently also serves as the director of the UCSF Behavioral Sleep Medicine Research Program and co-director (with colleague Elissa Epel, PhD) of the UCSF Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center.
His research focuses on the impact of poor sleep on physical health and emotional well-being. Prather measures sleep habits to determine which study participants are vulnerable to sleep-related health problems and which are resilient, with the goal of developing new treatments. His work has been central to studies that have documented the effect of sleep and sleep deprivation on the human immune system, the prevalence of preterm births, and the potency of vaccines.
Prather is also a practicing psychologist who treats insomnia with individual cognitive behavioral therapy, including behavioral therapy designed to help patients adjust to using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) equipment. He recently published his first book, The Sleep Prescription: 7 Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest, which highlights many of the solutions he uses to help patients achieve restorative sleep.
He is a member of the Sleep Research Society, American Psychological Association (APA), American Psychosomatic Society (APS), and Society for Affective Science. Prather has received numerous honors and awards in recognition of his work, including the APS Herbert Weiner Early Career Award, the National Academy of Medicine’s Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award, the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society’s Robert Ader New Investigator Award, and the APA Society for Health Psychology’s Excellence in Health Psychology Research by an Early Career Professional Award.
“I can think of no one better equipped to continue and build upon Nancy Adler’s remarkable legacy,” said Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences chair and Oberndorf Family Distinguished Professor Matthew W. State, MD, PhD. “Aric has been an integral part of the CHC over the past decade and I am excited that he will continue to play a central role in furthering its important mission of advancing our understanding of and addressing the social determinants of health and health disparities.”
CHC committed to understanding and addressing health disparities
The Center for Health and Community was founded in 1998 by pioneering social scientist Nancy Adler, PhD, as an independent UCSF research unit. After working in close partnership with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences for a quarter of a century, the CHC became an official part of the department earlier this year.
Since its inception, the CHC has secured impactful cross-disciplinary research and multicenter grants while supporting and linking faculty across UCSF’s four professional schools — Dental, Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy — whose work addresses a wide range of determinants of health. It also hosts a number of unique research programs focusing on key areas of interest, including the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion (AME) Center; Consortium for Obesity Assessment, Study, and Treatment (COAST); Social Interventions Research and Evaluation Network (SIREN); Stress, Eating, and Early Development (SEED) Study; and the national program office of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Evidence for Action Program.
The CHC and its members also play important roles in training the next generation of clinicians and researchers to recognize and address social, behavioral, and policy determinants of health. It has been instrumental in the UCSF School of Medicine’s development of innovative curricula for pre-clinical and clinical physician trainees that promote their understanding of the contributions of non-biological factors to health, disease, and recovery and prepares them to work in a complex socio-political professional environment that crosses traditional boundaries. CHC faculty have also been key contributors to the UCSF Health Psychology Fellowship Program, an NIHM-funded T32 postdoctoral training program dedicated to fostering young scientists seeking to conduct interdisciplinary research at the intersection of psychology and medicine.
