Research Seminars

The Osher Center for Integrative Medicine hosts monthly research lectures, which are open to the research community at large. They are held at 1545 Divisadero, 5th Floor, Room 523. We hope to see you there, and feel free to bring your lunch!

Friday, January 4, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Teaching Positive Emotion and Coping Skills on the Internet:
Successes, Insights, and “Learning Experiences”
Michael Cohn, PhD

Michael Cohn, PhD, completed a 2-year post-doctoral research fellowship and is an investigator who works with Judy Moskowitz and colleagues to teach skills for gratitude, mindfulness, and appreciating positive events through interactive online courses. He is a social psychologist and self-taught computer programmer who believes the Internet can empower people to learn and apply powerful psychological tools in their everyday lives. He will present data from recent studies applying an internet-based positive emotion intervention.

Friday, February 1, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Food, Nutrition and Cancer: Recent Recommendations and Evidence
Lawrence H. Kushi, Sc.D

Lawrence H. Kushi, is an epidemiologist with interests in nutrition and associated factors in cancer etiology and prognosis.  He is the Principal Investigator of NIH-funded prospective cohort studies examining lifestyle and molecular factors, including use of alternative therapies, in breast cancer prognosis, and environmental and other factors in onset of puberty in girls.  He is also the Principal Investigator of the NCI-supported HMO Cancer Research Network, which supports cancer research in integrated health care settings.  Among other activities, he has chaired the American Cancer Society’s committee on nutrition and physical activity guidelines for cancer prevention, of which the most recent update was published in 2012.  He has also advised the World Cancer Research Fund on their currently ongoing systematic literature review on nutrition and physical activity in breast cancer prognosis.  A graduate of Amherst College and the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Kushi is Director of Scientific Policy and investigator at the Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente Northern California.  He was the Vahlteich Professor of Human Nutrition at Columbia University, and previously held research and faculty positions at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Friday, March 1, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
So, What is a Paleolithic Diet and How Can it Help You?
Lynda Frassetto, MD

Lynda Frassetto, MD, is a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology at the University of California, San Francisco (USCF).  With Drs. Anthony Sebastian and R. Curtis Morris Jr, over the last 15 years, the group has published research addressing the question “to what diet are humans best adapted?”  evaluating effects on bone, acid base balance, and metabolic and exercise physiologic markers.  In addition to research, Dr. Frassetto is presently the director of the adult Clinical Research Center at the Parnassus Campus in UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, supervises inpatient and outpatient care at three of the University’s hospital campuses, and for the last several years has been participating in programs that teach better communication and behavioral stress modification techniques.

Friday, May 3, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
The Biology of Pain and Its Control
Howard Fields, MD, PhD

Howard Fields received his MD and PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford in 1965-66.  He then spent three years as a research neurologist at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.  Following clinical training in neurology at Harvard, he joined the faculty of the University of California San Francisco, where he is currently Professor of Neurology, director of the Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction.  His research group was the first to demonstrate the clinical effectiveness of opioids for neuropathic pain and of topical lidocaine for post-herpetic neuralgia.  He discovered and elucidated a pain modulating neural circuit that is required for opioids to produce analgesia. He also discovered that placebo analgesia is blocked by an opioid antagonist.  He has discovered nerve cells in the ventral striatum that selectively encode the magnitude of a reward.  He has over 300 scientific publications and has received numerous research awards.  His honors include include a Merit Award from NIH, the Kerr Award of the American Pain Society, the Cotzias Award of the American Academy of Neurology and the R.D. Adams lecture of the American Neurological Association.  He also gave the Beecher Lecture (in anesthesiology) and the Adams Lecture (in neurology) at Harvard.  In 1997, he was elected to membership in the Institute of Medicine and in 2010 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Friday, May 31, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
The Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST) for building more efficient and effective behavioral interventions
Linda Collins PhD

Professor of Human Development & Family Studies and Professor of Statistics at Penn State.  She is also Director of The Methodology Center, an interdisciplinary research center devoted to the advancement and dissemination of quantitative methods for applications in the behavioral sciences.  Since 1996 she has been Director of a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Center of Excellence, Center for Prevention and Treatment Methodology. She is currently co-Director of the NIDA-funded Prevention and Methodology Training Program.  Besides NIDA, other funders of her research have included the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.  Dr. Collins’s research interests include analysis of longitudinal data, particularly latent class approaches, and engineering-inspired methods for improving behavioral interventions.  Recently she has been particularly active in working on the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST), a methodological framework for optimizing and evaluating behavioral interventions.