The UC San Francisco Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences recently announced the appointment of two accomplished faculty members to endowed chair positions by UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood, MBBS, and School of Medicine Dean Talmadge E. King, Jr., MD. Both appointments have been bestowed in recognition of the recipients’ outstanding accomplishments and to support future scholarly growth and further excellence across the department’s clinical, research, educational, and public service missions.
Sarlo-Ekman Endowed Chair in the Study of Human Emotion
Professor Elissa Epel, PhD, has been named the Sarlo-Ekman Endowed Chair in the Study of Human Emotion. She is the department’s Vice Chair for Psychology Research and Diversity, Health Equity, and Community, as well as the director of the UCSF Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center, associate director of the UCSF Center for Health and Community and the UCSF Nutrition Obesity Research Center. Epel also leads the UC Climate Change and Mental Health Council, part of the University of California-wide Center for Climate, Health and Equity.
She studies psychological, social, and behavioral processes related to chronic psychological stress and health, and how to apply them to scalable interventions for vulnerable populations. Epel specifically studies processes that accelerate biological aging, with a focus on toxic stress, overeating and effects on metabolism, and cellular aging (including the telomere/telomerase maintenance system). Currently, she is testing short term interventions to slow aging by improving stress resilience and physiological homeostatic capacity.
Epel studied psychology and psychobiology at Stanford University, and clinical and health psychology at Yale University. She completed a clinical internship at the Palo Alto Veterans Healthcare System and an NIMH postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF. She has received numerous awards, including the APA Early Career Award, Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research Neal Miller Young Investigator Award, and the Alliance for Aging Research Silver Innovator Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, past president of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and co-chair of the Mind and Life Institute Steering Council.
In 2017, she partnered with nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, to publish The Telomere Effect, a New York Times bestseller which has been translated into over 30 languages. Five years later, Epel wrote The Stress Prescription, which focuses on science-based fundamental practices for reducing stress and increasing well-being.
The Sarlo-Ekman Endowed Chair supports research, teaching, and service activities related to the study of human emotion. It is named in honor of Paul Ekman, PhD, emeritus professor of psychiatry at UCSF and a noted expert on reading facial expression and the detection of deceit.
Pritzker Family Fund Endowed Chair for Health and Community
Professor Aric A. Prather, PhD, has been named the Pritzker Family Fund Endowed Chair for Health and Community. He is the director of the UCSF 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 received his doctoral degree in clinical and biological health psychology from the University of Pittsburgh and has been a UCSF faculty member since 2012. He was named an associate director of the CHC in 2014 and was appointed to his current role earlier this year. He also currently also serves as the director of the UCSF Behavioral Sleep Medicine Research Program and co-director 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.
The Pritzker Family Fund Endowed Chair was established to support the activities of the CHC director in furtherance of the center’s mission of advancing cross-disciplinary research and training the next generation of clinicians and researchers to recognize and address social, behavioral, and policy determinants of health.
About UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care, and public service.
UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences conducts its clinical, educational, and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including the UCSF Nancy Friend Pritzker Psychiatry Building; UCSF Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital; UCSF Medical Centers at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, and Mount Zion; UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland; Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center; the San Francisco VA Health Care System; UCSF Fresno; and numerous community-based sites around the San Francisco Bay Area.
About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences
The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.
The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Neurology, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
About UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area.
