University of California, Los Angeles Identifying Social, Molecular, & Immunological Processess for Mitigating Toxic Stress & Enhancing Personalized Resilience

Dr. George Slavich is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, Founding Director of the UCLA Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research, an Investigator at the One Mind Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and a Research Scientist at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

He is a leading expert in the conceptualization, assessment, and management of life stress, and in psychological and biological mechanisms linking stress with poor health. He developed the first online system for assessing lifetime stressor exposure, formulated the first fully integrated multi-level theory of depression, and is helping pioneer a new field of research called human social genomics, which is revealing how social experiences reach deep inside the body to affect the human genome. His recent research focuses on Social Safety Theory, which describes how experiences of social safety and threat influence the brain and immune system to affect human health, wellbeing, aging, and behavior.

Dr. Slavich completed undergraduate and graduate coursework in psychology and communication at Stanford University and received his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon. He then completed a clinical internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and post-doctoral research fellowships at UCSF and UCLA.

Dr. Atul Butte is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor and inaugural Director of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Butte is also the Chief Data Scientist for the University of California Health System. Dr. Butte has been continually funded by NIH for 20 years, is an inventor on 24 patents, and has authored over 200 publications. His research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine. Dr. Butte was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in 2015, and in 2013 he was recognized by the Obama Administration as a White House Champion of Change in Open Science for promoting science through publicly available data. Dr. Butte is also a founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis, providing medical genome sequencing services; Carmenta, discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications; and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data.

Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children's Hospital Boston, then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT.

Dr. Patricia Lester is the Jane and Marc Nathanson Family Professor of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where she directs the Division of Population Behavioral Health within the Department of Psychiatry. She also serves as the Director of the Nathanson Family Resilience Center, as Medical Director of the Family Stress, Trauma and Resilience Service (STAR), as Co-Director of the Center for Child Anxiety Resilience Education and Support, and as part of the founding leadership team for the Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families. Dr. Lester has sustained a career-long focus on developing and disseminating preventive interventions, practices, and policies that support child and family resilience in the context of trauma and adversity. Her research and leadership have focused on the study of translational and implementation processes needed to bring evidence-based prevention to scale within systems of care and community settings.

Dr. Lester earned her MD at UCSF School of Medicine.

Dr. Alicia Lieberman is the Irving B. Harris Endowed Chair in Infant Mental Health and Vice Chair for Academic Affairs at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and Director of the Child Trauma Research Program. She is also a clinical consultant with the San Francisco Human Services Agency. Dr. Lieberman is currently the director of the Early Trauma Treatment Network (ETTN), a collaborative of four university sites. Her major interests include infant mental health, disorders of attachment, early trauma treatment outcome research, and mental health service disparities for underserved and minority children and families. As a trilingual, tricultural Jewish Latina, she has a special interest in cultural issues involving child development, child rearing, and child mental health.

She is active in major national organizations involved with mental health in infancy and early childhood, and has served on peer review panels of the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Lieberman is on the Board of Trustees of the Irving Harris Foundation, and consults with the Miriam and Peter Haas Foundation on early childhood education for Palestinian-Israeli children.

Born and raised in Paraguay, she received her BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and PhD from Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Michael Syder is a leader in the field of functional genomics and multiomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. Dr. Snyder’s laboratory was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He launched the field of personalized medicine by combining different state-of–the-art “omics” technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile of a person, and his laboratory pioneered the use of wearables technologies (smart watches and continuous glucose monitors) for precision health. He is a cofounder of many biotechnology companies, including Personalis, SensOmics, Qbio, January, Protos, Oralome, Mirvie and Filtricine.

Dr. Snyder received his PhD at the California Institute of Technology and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University.

Dr. Shannon Thyne is a Vice-Chair in the Department of Pediatrics, Chief of Pediatrics at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center, and Director of Pediatrics for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. She is a board-certified pediatrician with leadership experience in clinical operations, medical education, and clinical care for children and youth in the safety net. Her clinical and academic areas of focus include asthma, foster care, childhood adversity/resilience, and behavioral health. Dr. Thyne recently partnered with California's Department of Healthcare Services and the Office of the Surgeon General to address childhood adversity as Co-PI of the UCLA/UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network (UCAAN).

Dr. Thyne received her BA from Yale College and completed her MD at Brown University.