Emeran Mayer

Dr. Mayer is a Professor in the Departments of Medicine, Physiology and Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA, and Executive Director of the NIH-funded UCLA Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Co-director of the CURE: Digestive Diseases Research Center at UCLA. His career long interest in the role of the brain in health and chronic disease, and in the regulation of visceral function started with early studies in brain heart interactions, before focusing on the interactions between the brain and the digestive system. He has 20 years of experience in the study of clinical and neurobiological aspects of how the digestive system and the nervous system interact in health and disease. He has published 170 original peer reviewed articles, 85 chapters and reviews, co-edited four books, and organized several interdisciplinary symposia in the area of visceral pain and mind body interactions. He has made seminal contributions to the characterization of physiologic alterations in patients with functional gastrointestinal disorders, particularly in the area of interoceptive mechanisms, including visceral pain and altered brain responses in humans. Over the span of his career, his research interests have included basic, translational and clinical aspects of brain gut and brain bladder interactions in health and disease. During the past 5 years, he has expanded his research interest to studying alterations in interoceptive mechanisms in various disorders of brain gut interactions, including inflammatory bowel disease, eating disorders (obesity and anorexia), anxiety disorders and autism. He is pursuing these research goals in close interdisciplinary collaborations with investigators in psychology, psychiatry and neurobiology, using advanced functional and structural imaging techniques, including imaging genetics approaches in humans and in animals.