Grantee: Michael R. Irwin

Michael R. Irwin, MD

• University of California - Los Angeles

Michael Irwin, M.D., is one of the world's foremost experts on the psychoneuroimmunological pathways by which psychosocial and behavioral factors influence health and disease. He is the Norman Cousins Distinguished Professorship in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine; Director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the UCLA Semel Institute; and Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the UCLA Semel Institute. His research focuses on understanding the reciprocal interactions between the immune and central nervous systems and the role of sleep disturbance on the molecular and cellular inflammatory signaling pathways that influence depression and physical health risk among cancer survivors and older adults.

Dr. Irwin discovered that stress activation of central neuropeptides (i.e., CRH) regulates cellular and innate immune responses. It is characterized as a "conserved transcriptional response to adversity," in which stress both steers a reduction in anti-viral immunity and simultaneously induces transcriptional activation of inflammatory signaling. Stress activation also demonstrated that sleep disturbance activates biological aging, which increases risk for chronic disease and depression. Dr. Irwin was among the first to show that inflammation causally induces depression by regulating affect mechanisms, reward processing, and related neural sensitivities. These mechanisms together guided his development of a novel social signal transduction theory of depression. His pioneering work in psychoneuroimmunology has defined the biological basis for the efficacy of behavioral and mind-body treatments to complement traditional biomedical approaches, augment anti-viral vaccine responses, and reverse inflammatory signaling and molecular markers of aging. Dr. Irwin has developed and empirically validated a curriculum-based mindfulness program for depression and insomnia, which is now used in multi-site trials and disseminated globally by virtue of community outreach, an international training program, and web-based platforms.